Artificial Neural Network Based Analysis of High Throughput Screening Data for Improved Prediction of Active Compounds

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are trained using High Throughput Screening (HTS) data to recover active compounds from a large data set. Improved classification performance was obtained on combining predictions made by multiple ANNs. The HTS data, acquired from a Methionine Aminopeptidases Inhibition study, consisted of a library of 43,347 compounds, and the ratio of active to non-active compounds, RA/N, was 0.0321. Back-propagation ANNs were trained and validated using Principal Components derived from the physico-chemical features of the compounds. On selecting the training parameters carefully, an ANN recovers one-third of all active compounds from the validation set with a three-fold gain in RA/N value. Further gains in RA/N values were obtained upon combining the predictions made by a number of ANNs. The generalization property of the back-propagation ANNs was utilized to train those ANNs with the same training samples, after being initialized with different sets of random weights. As a result, only 10% of all available compounds were needed for training and validation, and the rest of the data set was screened with more than a ten-fold gain of the original RA/N value. Thus, ANNs trained with limited HTS data might become useful in recovering active compounds from large data sets