Strip mining for molecules

Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) problems deal with "in-silico" chemical design for the virtual invention of novel pharmaceuticals. The goal of QSAR is to predict the bioactivities of molecules based on a set of descriptive features. QSAR problems are notoriously challenging for machine learning because a typical QSAR predictive data mining problem set is characterized by a large number of descriptive features (300-1000), often for a relatively small number of molecules (50-300). This paper introduces data strip mining for QSAR modeling. Strip mining is a general approach for feature selection and predictive modeling based on successive stages of feature elimination done by performing a sensitivity analysis to a predictive model.