Deep learning has been getting some press in the last few months, especially with the Google paper on recognizing cats (amongst other things) from Youtube videos. The concepts underlying this machine learning approach have been around for many years, though recent work by Hinton and others have led to fast implementations of the algorithms as […]
Predictive models – Implementation vs Specification
Benjamin Good recently asked about the existence of public repositories of predictive molecular signatures. From his description, he’s looking for platforms that are capable of deploying predictive models. The need for something like this is certainly not restricted to genomics – the QSAR field has been in need for this for many years. A few […]
New version of fingerprint (3.4.9) – faster Dice similarity matrices
I’ve just pushed a new version of the fingerprint package that contains an update provided by Abhik Seal that significantly speeds up calculation of pairwise similarity matrices when using the Dice similarity method. A ran a simple comparison using different numbers of random fingerprints (1024 bits, with 512 bits set to one, randomly) and measured […]
Competitive Predictive Modeling – How Useful is it?
While at the ACS National Meeting in Philadelphia I attended a talk by David Thompson of Boehringer Ingelheim (BI), where he spoke about a recent competition BI sponsored on Kaggle – a web site that hosts data mining competitions. In this instance, BI provided a dataset that contained only object identifiers and about 1700 numerical […]
I’d Rather Be … Reverse Engineering
Gamification is a hot topic and companies such as Tunedit and Kaggle are succesfully hosting a variety of data mining competitions. These competitions employ data from a variety of domains such as bond trading, essay scoring and so on. Recently, both platforms have hosted a QSAR challenge (though not officially denoted as such). The most […]