Adaptive modelling of structured molecular representations for toxicity prediction.

We investigated the possibility of modelling structure-toxicity relationships by direct treatment of the molecular structure (without using descriptors) through an adaptive model able to retain the appropriate structural information. With respect to traditional descriptor-based approaches, this provides a more general and flexible way to tackle prediction problems that is particularly suitable when little or no background knowledge is available. Our method employs a tree-structured molecular representation, which is processed by a recursive neural network (RNN). To explore the realization of RNN modelling in toxicological problems, we employed a data set containing growth impairment concentrations (IGC50) for Tetrahymena pyriformis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]