Large-scale prediction of activity cliffs using machine and deep learning methods of increasing complexity

Activity cliffs (AC) are formed by pairs of structural analogues that are active against the same target but have a large difference in potency. While much of our knowledge about ACs has originated from the analysis and comparison of compounds and activity data, several studies have reported AC predictions over the past decade. Different from typical compound classification tasks, AC predictions must be carried out at the level of compound pairs representing ACs or nonACs. Most AC predictions reported so far have focused on individual methods or comparisons of two or three approaches and only investigated a few compound activity classes (from 2 to 10). Although promising prediction accuracy has been reported in most cases, different system set-ups, AC definitions, methods, and calculation conditions were used, precluding direct comparisons of these studies. Therefore, we have carried out a large-scale AC prediction campaign across 100 activity classes comparing machine learning methods of greatly varying complexity, ranging from pair-based nearest neighbor classifiers and decision tree or kernel methods to deep neural networks. The results of our systematic predictions revealed the level of accuracy that can be expected for AC predictions across many different compound classes. In addition, prediction accuracy did not scale with methodological complexity but was significantly influenced by memorization of compounds shared by different ACs or nonACs. In many instances, limited training data were sufficient for building accurate models using different methods and there was no detectable advantage of deep learning over simpler approaches for AC prediction. On a global scale, support vector machine models performed best, by only small margins compared to others including simple nearest neighbor classifiers. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT: [Image: see text] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13321-022-00676-7.