PegaPlus─Interactive Machine Learning by Human Observation for Efficient Clustering and Analysis of...

In the early stages of drug discovery, the identification of molecular series with lead-like properties is essential for structure-activity relationship studies. A common first step is to cluster data derived from high-throughput screening (HTS). This data then needs to be exhaustively refined by an expert to identify bioactive compound classes. Here, we present the novel, interactive, and visual approach named PegaPlus for the analysis of HTS data, facilitating the incorporation of expert knowledge with the strategy of learning by observation. PegaPlus uses a tailored variant of a stochastic proximity embedding algorithm to visualize the clustered data in a two-dimensional plane via a web interface. The user can iteratively modify the proposed compound clustering by dragging data points in the drawing plane. At each step, an online support vector machine learns and improves its clustering predictions by incorporating user modifications and the molecular features of the compounds. The visualization is also updated based on the user's input and molecular similarity. PegaPlus was developed with the exploratory process in mind and allows the user to freely organize molecules on the drawing plane, or filter them by various molecular properties. Our evaluation shows that PegaPlus reduces the number of refinement steps needed by half in comparison to the purely manual approach on multiple data sets. These results demonstrate how an interactive machine learning approach can reliably support medicinal chemists and automate time-consuming, manual refinement tasks. The PegaPlus web server is openly available at pegaplus.zbh.uni-hamburg.de.