Low-Quality Structural and Interaction Data Improves Binding Affinity Prediction via Random Forest

Docking scoring functions can be used to predict the strength of protein-ligand binding. It is widely believed that training a scoring function with low-quality data is detrimental for its predictive performance. Nevertheless, there is a surprising lack of systematic validation experiments in suppor...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hongjian Li, Kwong-Sak Leung, Man-Hon Wong, Pedro J. Ballester
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2015-06-01
Series:Molecules
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/20/6/10947
Description
Summary:Docking scoring functions can be used to predict the strength of protein-ligand binding. It is widely believed that training a scoring function with low-quality data is detrimental for its predictive performance. Nevertheless, there is a surprising lack of systematic validation experiments in support of this hypothesis. In this study, we investigated to which extent training a scoring function with data containing low-quality structural and binding data is detrimental for predictive performance. We actually found that low-quality data is not only non-detrimental, but beneficial for the predictive performance of machine-learning scoring functions, though the improvement is less important than that coming from high-quality data. Furthermore, we observed that classical scoring functions are not able to effectively exploit data beyond an early threshold, regardless of its quality. This demonstrates that exploiting a larger data volume is more important for the performance of machine-learning scoring functions than restricting to a smaller set of higher data quality.
ISSN:1420-3049