PRAISE: A Reproducible Workflow for Non-Programmer Scientists to Implement Published AI Models

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are increasingly developed, published and used across scientific fields. Researchers, students and industry professionals who want to apply these models to their own research questions often lack the programming and data science expertise to do so. Existing guidelines cover single steps, but not the route from a published model to working predictions on one's own data. Here we present the hands-on workflow PRAISE, a Practical, Reproducible AI-model Implementation for Science and Education, that helps non-programmers implement published AI models step by step. Because implementations rarely work the first time, PRAISE anticipates common failures and provides a fallback route for each. As a proof of principle, three BSc chemistry students and their tutor applied PRAISE without prior programming or data science knowledge. They reproduced, validated and extended a state-of-the-art model that predicts enzyme-substrate interactions. This shows that with PRAISE, implementing an AI model from the literature becomes a learnable skill, one that turns non-programmer scientists from users into evaluators and improvers of AI models.