Regarding EDBO, categorical variables, namely, distinct chemical entities, are one-hot-encoded and the default setting is used with minor changes to the original package to allow customized input for the number of initial samples (see the changes in the forked version at tree/pwas_comp). As for PWAS, the default setting is used, i.e., the number of initial partitions (K init ) is set to 10, with the tradeoff parameter between exploitation and exploration (θ E ) set to be 0.5. And the categorical variables are one-hot encoded.