Evidence map›Paper›PMID 39788952›Full record

ArticleNature communications2025

Coverage bias in small molecule machine learning.

Fleming Kretschmer, Jan Seipp, Marcus Ludwig, Gunnar W Klau, Sebastian Böcker

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
23citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

23 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Annotating Tandem Mass Spectra in Metabolomics with DreaMS and MassSpecGym.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2027
    Article
  2. Predicting Functional Diversity Within Enzyme Families: A Practical Perspective.Chembiochem : a European journal of chemical biology · 2026
    Review
  3. Article
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  11. Defining the Data set Defines the QSAR Claim.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2026
    Article
  12. Article
  13. Navigating the conjugated metabolome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
    Article
  14. Article
  15. Article
  16. Article
  17. Article
  18. MSNature methods · 2025
    Article
  19. Article
  20. Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

Fleming KretschmerChair for Bioinformatics, Institute for Computer Science, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8523-6546
Jan SeippAlgorithmic Bioinformatics, Institute for Computer Science, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Marcus LudwigChair for Bioinformatics, Institute for Computer Science, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9981-2153
Gunnar W KlauAlgorithmic Bioinformatics, Institute for Computer Science, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6340-0090
Sebastian BöckerChair for Bioinformatics, Institute for Computer Science, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany. sebastian.boecker@uni-jena.de.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9304-8091

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) BO 1910/23Thüringer Ministerium für Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Digitale Gesellschaft (Thuringian Ministry of Economics, Science and Digital Society) DigLeben-5575/10-9
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Small molecule machine learning aims to predict chemical, biochemical, or biological properties from molecular structures, with applications such as toxicity prediction, ligand binding, and pharmacokinetics. A recent trend is developing end-to-end models that avoid explicit domain knowledge. These models assume no coverage bias in training and evaluation data, meaning the data are representative of the true distribution. However, the domain of applicability is rarely considered in such models. Here, we investigate how well large-scale datasets cover the space of known biomolecular structures. For doing so, we propose a distance measure based on solving the Maximum Common Edge Subgraph (MCES) problem, which aligns well with chemical similarity. Although this method is computationally hard, we introduce an efficient approach combining Integer Linear Programming and heuristic bounds. Our findings reveal that many widely-used datasets lack uniform coverage of biomolecular structures, limiting the predictive power of models trained on them. We propose two additional methods to assess whether training datasets diverge from known molecular distributions, potentially guiding future dataset creation to improve model performance.

Indexed as

Machine LearningAlgorithmsLigandsMolecular StructureSmall Molecule LibrariesLigandsSmall Molecule Libraries

Identifiers

PMID39788952
PMCPMC11718084

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.