Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Virany, Walter, Tripp, Austin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17078
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912723016613888
author Virany, Walter
Tripp, Austin
author_facet Virany, Walter
Tripp, Austin
contents Molecular fingerprinting methods use hash functions to create fixed-length vector representations of molecules. However, hash collisions cause distinct substructures to be represented with the same feature, leading to overestimates in molecular similarity calculations. We investigate whether using exact fingerprints improves accuracy compared to standard compressed fingerprints in molecular property prediction and Bayesian optimization where the underlying predictive model is a Gaussian process. We find that using exact fingerprints yields a small yet consistent improvement in predictive accuracy on five molecular property prediction benchmarks from the DOCKSTRING dataset. However, these gains did not translate to significant improvements in Bayesian optimization performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hash Collisions in Molecular Fingerprints: Effects on Property Prediction and Bayesian Optimization
Virany, Walter
Tripp, Austin
Machine Learning
Molecular fingerprinting methods use hash functions to create fixed-length vector representations of molecules. However, hash collisions cause distinct substructures to be represented with the same feature, leading to overestimates in molecular similarity calculations. We investigate whether using exact fingerprints improves accuracy compared to standard compressed fingerprints in molecular property prediction and Bayesian optimization where the underlying predictive model is a Gaussian process. We find that using exact fingerprints yields a small yet consistent improvement in predictive accuracy on five molecular property prediction benchmarks from the DOCKSTRING dataset. However, these gains did not translate to significant improvements in Bayesian optimization performance.
title Hash Collisions in Molecular Fingerprints: Effects on Property Prediction and Bayesian Optimization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17078