The collection of chemical structure information and associated experimental data for quantitative structure–activity/property relationship (QSAR/QSPR) modeling is facilitated by an increasing number of public databases containing large amounts of useful data. However, the performance of QSAR models highly depends on the quality of the data and modeling methodology used. This study aims to develop robust QSAR/QSPR models for chemical properties of environmental interest that can be used for regulatory purposes. This study primarily uses data from the publicly available PHYSPROP database consisting of a set of 13 common physicochemical and environmental fate properties. These datasets have undergone extensive curation using an automated workflow to select only high-quality data, and the chemical structures were standardized prior to calculation of the molecular descriptors. The modeling procedure was developed based on the five Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) principles for QSAR models. A weighted k-nearest neighbor approach was adopted using a minimum number of required descriptors calculated using PaDEL, an open-source software. The genetic algorithms selected only the most pertinent and mechanistically interpretable descriptors (2–15, with an average of 11 descriptors). The sizes of the modeled datasets varied from 150 chemicals for biodegradability half-life to 14,050 chemicals for logP, with an average of 3222 chemicals across all endpoints. The optimal models were built on randomly selected training sets (75%) and validated using fivefold cross-validation (CV) and test sets (25%). The CV Q2 of the models varied from 0.72 to 0.95, with an average of 0.86 and an R2 test value from 0.71 to 0.96, with an average of 0.82. Modeling and performance details are described in QSAR model reporting format and were validated by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center to be OECD compliant. All models are freely available as an open-source, command-line application called OPEn structure–activity/property Relationship App (OPERA). OPERA models were applied to more than 750,000 chemicals to produce freely available predicted data on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s CompTox Chemistry Dashboard.

/pdf/opera-models-for-predicting-physicochemical-properties-and-11mb12r5qy.pdf

OPERA models for predicting physicochemical properties and environmental fate endpoints

Cross-validation is a common method to validate a QSAR model. In cross-validation, some compounds are held out as a test set, while the remaining compounds form a training set. A model is built from the training set, and the test set compounds are predicted on that model. The agreement of the predicted and observed activity values of the test set (measured by, say, R2) is an estimate of the self-consistency of the model and is sometimes taken as an indication of the predictivity of the model. This estimate of predictivity can be optimistic or pessimistic compared to true prospective prediction, depending how compounds in the test set are selected. Here, we show that time-split selection gives an R2 that is more like that of true prospective prediction than the R2 from random selection (too optimistic) or from our analog of leave-class-out selection (too pessimistic). Time-split selection should be used in addition to random selection as a standard for cross-validation in QSAR model building.

Time-Split Cross-Validation as a Method for Estimating the Goodness of Prospective Prediction.

The estimation of accuracy and applicability of QSAR and QSPR models for biological and physicochemical properties represents a critical problem. The developed parameter of “distance to model” (DM) is defined as a metric of similarity between the training and test set compounds that have been subjected to QSAR/QSPR modeling. In our previous work, we demonstrated the utility and optimal performance of DM metrics that have been based on the standard deviation within an ensemble of QSAR models. The current study applies such analysis to 30 QSAR models for the Ames mutagenicity data set that were previously reported within the 2009 QSAR challenge. We demonstrate that the DMs based on an ensemble (consensus) model provide systematically better performance than other DMs. The presented approach identifies 30−60% of compounds having an accuracy of prediction similar to the interlaboratory accuracy of the Ames test, which is estimated to be 90%. Thus, the in silico predictions can be used to halve the cost of exp...

Applicability domains for classification problems: Benchmarking of distance to models for Ames mutagenicity set.

Conformal prediction is introduced as an alternative approach to domain applicability estimation. The advantages of using conformal prediction are as follows: First, the approach is based on a consistent and well-defined mathematical framework. Second, the understanding of the confidence level concept in conformal predictions is straightforward, e.g. a confidence level of 0.8 means that the conformal predictor will commit, at most, 20% errors (i.e., true values outside the assigned prediction range). Third, the confidence level can be varied depending on the situation where the model is to be applied and the consequences of such changes are readily understandable, i.e. prediction ranges are increased or decreased, and the changes can immediately be inspected. We demonstrate the usefulness of conformal prediction by applying it to 10 publicly available data sets.

Introducing conformal prediction in predictive modeling. A transparent and flexible alternative to applicability domain determination.

Classification rules are often used in chemoinformatics to predict categorical properties of drug candidates related to bioactivity from explanatory variables, which encode the respective molecular structures (i.e. molecular descriptors). To avoid predictions with an unduly large error probability, the domain the classifier is applied to should be restricted to the domain covered by the training set objects. This latter domain is commonly referred to as applicability domain in chemoinformatics. Conceptually, the applicability domain defines the region in space where the "normal" objects are located. Defining the border of the applicability domain may then be viewed as detecting anomalous or novel objects or as detecting outliers. Currently two different types of measures are in use. The first one defines the applicability domain solely in terms of the molecular descriptor space, which is referred to as novelty detection. The second type defines the applicability domain in terms of the expected reliability of the predictions which is referred to as confidence estimation. Both types are systematically differentiated here and the most popular measures are reviewed. It will be shown that all common chemoinformatic classifiers have built-in confidence scores. Since confidence estimation uses information of the class labels for computing the confidence scores, it is expected to be more efficient in reducing the error rate than novelty detection, which solely uses the information of the explanatory variables.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/minf.201501019

Chemoinformatic Classification Methods and their Applicability Domain.

The present work proposes a unified conceptual framework to describe and quantify the important issue of the Applicability Domains (AD) of Quantitative Structure−Activity Relationships (QSARs). AD models are conceived as meta-models μμ designed to associate an untrustworthiness score to any molecule M subject to property prediction by a QSAR model μ. Untrustworthiness scores or “AD metrics” Ψμ(M) are an expression of the relationship between M (represented by its descriptors in chemical space) and the space zones populated by the training molecules at the basis of model μ. Scores integrating some of the classical AD criteria (similarity-based, box-based) were considered in addition to newly invented terms such as the consensus prediction variance, the dissimilarity to outlier-free training sets, and the correlation breakdown count (the former two being most successful). A loose correlation is expected to exist between this untrustworthiness and the error |Pμ(M)-Pexpt(M)| affecting the property Pμ(M) predi...

Predicting the Predictability: A Unified Approach to the Applicability Domain Problem of QSAR Models

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Varnek Alexandre

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Predicting the Predictability: A Unified Approach to the Applicability Domain Problem of QSAR Models