Towards better understanding of feature-selection or reduction techniques for Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship models

A Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) is a linear or non-linear model, which relates variations in molecular descriptors to variations in the biological activity of a series of active and/or inactive molecules. For this article, different feature-selection or reduction methods were all coupled with Partial Least Squares (PLS) modeling during the selection of features. A PLS model was also built with the entire set of molecular descriptors and was used as a reference to check the reliability and the performance of the different feature-selection methods. To evaluate the ability of the different feature-selection methods, they were performed on two data sets.