Statistical methods for high throughput . . .

High Throughput Screening (HTS) is used in drug discovery to screen large numbers of compounds against a biological target. Data on activity against the target are collected for a representative sample of compounds selected from a large library. The goal of drug discovery is to relate the activity of a compound to its chemical structure, which is quantified by various explanatory variables, and hence to identify further active compounds. Often, this application has a very unbalanced class distribution, with a rare active class. Classification methods are commonly proposed as solutions to this problem. However, regarding drug discovery, researchers are more interested in ranking compounds by predicted activity than in the classification itself. This feature makes my approach distinct from common classification techniques. In thi