Experiments in predicting biodegradability

Saso Dzeroski     Hendrik Blockeel     S. Kramer     B. Kompare     B. Pfahringer     Wim Van Laer

Abstract:
We present a novel application of inductive logic programming (ILP) in the area of quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSARs). The activity we want to predict is the biodegradability of chemical compounds in water. In particular, the target variable is the half-life in water for aerobic aqueous biodegradation. Structural descriptions of chemicals in terms of atoms and bonds are derived from the chemicals' SMILES encodings. Definition of substructures are used as background knowledge. Predicting biodegradability is essentially a regression problem, but we also consider a discretized version of the target variable. We thus employ a number of relational classification and regression methods on the relational representation and compare these to propositional methods applied to different propositionalisations of the problem. Some expert comments on the induced theories are also given.

Published: S. Dzeroski, H. Blockeel, S. Kramer, B. Kompare, B. Pfahringer, en W. Van Laer, Experiments in predicting biodegradability, Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Inductive Logic Programming (Dzeroski, S. and Flach, P., eds.), vol 1634, LNAI, pp. 80-91, 1999

© Copyright 1999 by Springer-Verlag

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