QSAR analysis of a series of 2-aryl(heteroaryl)-2,5-dihydropyrazolo[4,3-c]quinolin-3-(3H)-ones using piecewise hyper-sphere modeling by particle swarm optimization

In the present work, we employed piecewise hyper-sphere modeling by particle swarm optimization (PHMPSO) which splits the dataset into subsets with desired linearity in each model for QSAR studies of a series of 2-aryl(heteroaryl)-2,5-dihydropyrazolo[4,3-c]quinolin-3-(3H)-ones (PQs) for their affinity to benzodiazepine receptor (BzR). The results were compared to those obtained by MLR modeling in a single model with the whole data set as well as in submodels based on K-means clustering analysis. It has been clearly shown that electronic descriptors and spatial descriptors play the important roles in the compounds’ affinity to BzR. In addition, the molecular density, the Y component of the principal moment of inertia, the magnitude and the Y component of the dipole moment of the molecules can detrimentally affect PQ analogue BzR affinity, while the X component of the dipole moment of the molecules can favorably affect compounds’ affinity.