Papers › An Improved Metric and Benchmark for Assessing the Performance of Virtual Screening Models

An Improved Metric and Benchmark for Assessing the Performance of Virtual Screening Models

15 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.10478archive 2025-07-28

Michael Brocidiacono, Konstantin I. Popov, Alexander Tropsha

Structure-based virtual screening (SBVS) is a key workflow in computational drug discovery. SBVS models are assessed by measuring the enrichment of known active molecules over decoys in retrospective screens. However, the standard formula for enrichment cannot estimate model performance on very large libraries. Additionally, current screening benchmarks cannot easily be used with machine learning (ML) models due to data leakage. We propose an improved formula for calculating VS enrichment and introduce the BayesBind benchmarking set composed of protein targets that are structurally dissimilar to those in the BigBind training set. We assess current models on this benchmark and find that none perform appreciably better than a KNN baseline.

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calc_best_efb molecularmodelinglab/bigbind/baselines/efb.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 3f6bd158d4229ad5 · report
calc_efb molecularmodelinglab/bigbind/baselines/efb.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · ddd3de1decd5424e · report

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