Urbanowicz Lab

The primary focus of the URBS Lab (Unbounded Research in Biomedical Systems) is the development, evaluation and application of machine-learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools/methods targeting various biomedical data types and problems. We develop and apply methods that (1) automate and provide rigor to machine-learning analyses, (2) can detect complex patterns of association, (e.g., epistasis and heterogeneity), (3) are interpretable/explainable to promote trust and translational adoption, as well as to identify and address sources of bias, (4) scale to “big data” and (5) flexibly adapt to common data challenges, (i.e., missing values, class imbalance, consideration of covariates). We aim to make ML and AI tools that are applicable to a wide variety of biomedical problems and that are accessible, reliable, reproducible, flexible, user-friendly, computationally efficient and transparent. Our lab holds particular interest in the research of rule-based ML, automated ML, feature selection and evolutionary algorithms.