Evaluating machine learning models for predicting pesticide toxicity to honey bees

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Adamczyk, Jakub, Poziemski, Jakub, Siedlecki, Pawel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Adamczyk, Jakub
Poziemski, Jakub
Siedlecki, Pawel
author_facet Adamczyk, Jakub
Poziemski, Jakub
Siedlecki, Pawel
contents Small molecules play a critical role in the biomedical, environmental, and agrochemical domains, each with distinct physicochemical requirements and success criteria. Although biomedical research benefits from extensive datasets and established benchmarks, agrochemical data remain scarce, particularly with respect to species-specific toxicity. This work focuses on ApisTox, the most comprehensive dataset of experimentally validated chemical toxicity to the honey bee (\textit{Apis mellifera}), an ecologically vital pollinator. The primary goal of this study was to determine the suitability of diverse machine learning approaches for modeling such toxicity, including molecular fingerprints, graph kernels, and graph neural networks, as well as pretrained models. Comparative analysis with medicinal datasets from the MoleculeNet benchmark reveals that ApisTox represents a distinct chemical space. Performance degradation on non-medicinal datasets, such as \mbox{ApisTox}, demonstrates their limited generalizability of current state-of-the-art algorithms trained solely on biomedical data. Our study highlights the need for more diverse datasets and for targeted model development geared toward the agrochemical domain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_24305
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating machine learning models for predicting pesticide toxicity to honey bees
Adamczyk, Jakub
Poziemski, Jakub
Siedlecki, Pawel
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Small molecules play a critical role in the biomedical, environmental, and agrochemical domains, each with distinct physicochemical requirements and success criteria. Although biomedical research benefits from extensive datasets and established benchmarks, agrochemical data remain scarce, particularly with respect to species-specific toxicity. This work focuses on ApisTox, the most comprehensive dataset of experimentally validated chemical toxicity to the honey bee (\textit{Apis mellifera}), an ecologically vital pollinator. The primary goal of this study was to determine the suitability of diverse machine learning approaches for modeling such toxicity, including molecular fingerprints, graph kernels, and graph neural networks, as well as pretrained models. Comparative analysis with medicinal datasets from the MoleculeNet benchmark reveals that ApisTox represents a distinct chemical space. Performance degradation on non-medicinal datasets, such as \mbox{ApisTox}, demonstrates their limited generalizability of current state-of-the-art algorithms trained solely on biomedical data. Our study highlights the need for more diverse datasets and for targeted model development geared toward the agrochemical domain.
title Evaluating machine learning models for predicting pesticide toxicity to honey bees
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24305