Feature selection for descriptor based classification models. 2. Human intestinal absorption (HIA).

We show that the topological polar surface area (TPSA) descriptor and the radial distribution function (RDF) applied to electronic and steric atom properties, like the conjugated electrotopological state (CETS), are the most relevant features/descriptors for predicting the human intestinal absorption (HIA) out of a large set of 2934 features/descriptors. A HIA data set with 196 molecules with measured HIA values and 2934 features/descriptors were calculated using JOELib and MOE. We used an adaptive boosting algorithm to solve the binary classification problem (AdaBoost.M1) and Genetic Algorithms based on Shannon Entropy Cliques (GA-SEC) variants as hybrid feature selection algorithms. The selection of relevant features was applied with respect to the generalization ability of the classification model, avoiding a high variance for unseen molecules (overfitting).