Rethinking the generalization of drug target affinity prediction algorithms via similarity aware evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Chenbin, Hu, Zhiqiang, Jiang, Chuchu, Chen, Wen, Xu, Jie, Zhang, Shaoting
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhang, Chenbin
Hu, Zhiqiang
Jiang, Chuchu
Chen, Wen
Xu, Jie
Zhang, Shaoting
author_facet Zhang, Chenbin
Hu, Zhiqiang
Jiang, Chuchu
Chen, Wen
Xu, Jie
Zhang, Shaoting
contents Drug-target binding affinity prediction is a fundamental task for drug discovery. It has been extensively explored in literature and promising results are reported. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that the results may be misleading and cannot be well generalized to real practice. The core observation is that the canonical randomized split of a test set in conventional evaluation leaves the test set dominated by samples with high similarity to the training set. The performance of models is severely degraded on samples with lower similarity to the training set but the drawback is highly overlooked in current evaluation. As a result, the performance can hardly be trusted when the model meets low-similarity samples in real practice. To address this problem, we propose a framework of similarity aware evaluation in which a novel split methodology is proposed to adapt to any desired distribution. This is achieved by a formulation of optimization problems which are approximately and efficiently solved by gradient descent. We perform extensive experiments across five representative methods in four datasets for two typical target evaluations and compare them with various counterpart methods. Results demonstrate that the proposed split methodology can significantly better fit desired distributions and guide the development of models. Code is released at https://github.com/Amshoreline/SAE/tree/main.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09481
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking the generalization of drug target affinity prediction algorithms via similarity aware evaluation
Zhang, Chenbin
Hu, Zhiqiang
Jiang, Chuchu
Chen, Wen
Xu, Jie
Zhang, Shaoting
Machine Learning
Methodology
Drug-target binding affinity prediction is a fundamental task for drug discovery. It has been extensively explored in literature and promising results are reported. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that the results may be misleading and cannot be well generalized to real practice. The core observation is that the canonical randomized split of a test set in conventional evaluation leaves the test set dominated by samples with high similarity to the training set. The performance of models is severely degraded on samples with lower similarity to the training set but the drawback is highly overlooked in current evaluation. As a result, the performance can hardly be trusted when the model meets low-similarity samples in real practice. To address this problem, we propose a framework of similarity aware evaluation in which a novel split methodology is proposed to adapt to any desired distribution. This is achieved by a formulation of optimization problems which are approximately and efficiently solved by gradient descent. We perform extensive experiments across five representative methods in four datasets for two typical target evaluations and compare them with various counterpart methods. Results demonstrate that the proposed split methodology can significantly better fit desired distributions and guide the development of models. Code is released at https://github.com/Amshoreline/SAE/tree/main.
title Rethinking the generalization of drug target affinity prediction algorithms via similarity aware evaluation
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09481