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  • Perspective
  • Published:

Evaluation guidelines for machine learning tools in the chemical sciences

Nature Reviews Chemistry volume 6, pages 428–442 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Machine learning (ML) promises to tackle the grand challenges in chemistry and speed up the generation, improvement and/or ordering of research hypotheses. Despite the overarching applicability of ML workflows, one usually finds diverse evaluation study designs. The current heterogeneity in evaluation techniques and metrics leads to difficulty in (or the impossibility of) comparing and assessing the relevance of new algorithms. Ultimately, this may delay the digitalization of chemistry at scale and confuse method developers, experimentalists, reviewers and journal editors. In this Perspective, we critically discuss a set of method development and evaluation guidelines for different types of ML-based publications, emphasizing supervised learning. We provide a diverse collection of examples from various authors and disciplines in chemistry. While taking into account varying accessibility across research groups, our recommendations focus on reporting completeness and standardizing comparisons between tools. We aim to further contribute to improved ML transparency and credibility by suggesting a checklist of retro-/prospective tests and dissecting their importance. We envisage that the wide adoption and continuous update of best practices will encourage an informed use of ML on real-world problems related to the chemical sciences.

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Fig. 1: Retrospective evaluation in ML.
Fig. 2: Comparison of ML utility relative to competing methods.
Fig. 3: Prospective evaluation of ML models.
Fig. 4: ML for knowledge augmentation.

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Acknowledgements

T.R. acknowledges FCT Portugal for funding (CEECIND/00684/2018). T.R. thanks colleagues for discussions on the topic presented here over the years. D. Reker is acknowledged for providing access to original data discussed in the manuscript. T.R., O.E. and A.B. acknowledge that not all suggested evaluation studies might simultaneously be found in their own original research manuscripts. We thank M. Thomas and M. Garcia-Ortegon for help with Table 1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Molecular Science Informatics, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Andreas Bender

  2. Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Novartis Pharma, Novartis Campus, Basel, Switzerland

    Nadine Schneider

  3. Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Marwin Segler

  4. Relay Therapeutics, Cambridge, MA, USA

    W. Patrick Walters

  5. Discovery Sciences, R&D, AstraZeneca, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Ola Engkvist

  6. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Ola Engkvist

  7. Research Institute for Medicines (iMed), Faculdade de Farmácia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Tiago Rodrigues

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All authors contributed to the discussion and writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tiago Rodrigues.

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Competing interests

T.R. is a co-founder and shareholder of TargTex and has acted as consultant to the pharmaceutical industry. A.B. is a co-founder and shareholder of Healx, PharmEnable and Terra Lumina and acts as a consultant to various pharmaceutical companies.

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Nature Reviews Chemistry thanks F. Grisoni and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Related links

DOCKSTRING: https://github.com/dockstring/dockstring

DUD-E: http://dude.docking.org/

ExCAPE: https://solr.ideaconsult.net/search/excape/

FS-Mol: https://github.com/microsoft/FS-Mol

GDB-13: https://gdb.unibe.ch/downloads/

GEOM: https://github.com/learningmatter-mit/geom

GuacaMol: https://github.com/BenevolentAI/guacamol

Kaggle competitions: http://www.kaggle.com/

MoleculeNet: https://moleculenet.org/

MOSES: https://github.com/molecularsets/moses

PDBbind: http://www.pdbbind.org.cn/

RXNMapper: http://rxnmapper.ai/

SAMPL blind challenges: http://www.samplchallenges.org/

USPTO: https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Chemical_reactions_from_US_patents_1976-Sep2016_/5104873

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Bender, A., Schneider, N., Segler, M. et al. Evaluation guidelines for machine learning tools in the chemical sciences. Nat Rev Chem 6, 428–442 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-022-00391-9

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