Benos Lab » College of Public Health and Health Professions

We are a diverse, interdisciplinary team who likes to tackle important questions in systems medicine by developing and using novel machine learning algorithms. Our ultimate goal is to identify risk factors and mechanisms affecting aging and contributing to the onset and progression of chronic diseases and cancer. We also develop predictive methods and tools that can directly improve health. We use probabilistic graphical models and other machine learning methods to integrate and mine high-dimensional, multi-modal biomedical data and to investigate biological processes pertinent to health and disease.

CausalMGM: causal discovery on mixed data types

Web server: https://db.cs.pitt.edu/causalmgm/

WordCloud of Benos Lab research

From titles and abstracts of Benos’ group 2020-2022.

Evaluating undetermined low dose CT scan nodules

Representative Recent publications

H. Mao*, M. Jia*, M. Di*, E. Valenzi, X.T. Cai, R. Lafyatis, K. Zhang, P.V. Benos, “HALO: Hierarchical Causal Modeling for Single Cell Multi-Omics Data”, Nature Communications (2025) 16:8892. [Abstract] [Article] [bioRxiv] [GitHub]
M. Jia, H. Mao, M. Zhou, Y.-C. Chen, P.V. Benos, “LaGrACE: Estimating gene program dysregulation with latent regulatory network”, Molecular Systems Biology (2025) 21:1263-1281. [Abstract] [Article] [bioRxiv] [GitHub]
D. Yuan, M.L. McKeague, V.K. Raghu, R.E. Schoen, O.J. Finn^#, P.V. Benos^#, “Immune cell transcriptional profiles from pre-vaccination peripheral blood predict immune response to preventative MUC1 cancer vaccine”, European Journal of Cancer, (2025), 228:115685. [Abstract] [Article] [bioRxiv]
T.C. Lovelace, M.H. Ryu, M. Jia, P. Castaldi, F.C. Sciurba, C.P. Hersh, P.V. Benos, “Development and validation of a mortality risk prediction model for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a cross-sectional study using probabilistic graphical modelling”, eClinicalMedicine (2024) 75:102786. [Abstract] [Article] [medRxiv]
R.W. Gregg, C.M. Karoleski, E.K. Silverman, F.C. Sciurba, D.L. DeMeo, P.V. Benos, “Identification of Factors Directly Linked to Incident Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Causal Graph Modeling Study”, PLoS Medicine (2024) 21:e1004444. [Abstract] [Article]
W. Zeng, A. Thatayatikom, N. Winn, T.C. Lovelace, I. Bhattacharyya, T. Schrepfer, A. Shah, R. Gonik, P.V. Benos#, S. Cha#, “The novel Florida Scoring System for stratifying children suspected of Sjögren’s disease: findings from the first data-driven cross-sectional study applied to a rare pediatric cohort”. Lancet Rheumatology (2024) 6:e279-e290. [Abstract] [Article]