Denoising Drug Discovery Data for Improved ADMET Property Prediction

Predicting ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity) properties of small molecules is a key task in drug discovery. A major challenge in building better ADMET models is the experimental error inherent in the data. Furthermore, ADMET predictors are typically regression tasks due to the continuous nature of the data. This makes it difficult to apply existing methods as most focus on classification tasks. Here, we develop denoising schemes based on deep learning to address this. We find that the training error can be used to identify the noise in regression tasks while ensemble-based and forgotten event-based metrics fail to detect the noise. The most significant performance increase occurs when the original model is finetuned with the denoised data using training error as the noise detection metric. Our method has the ability to improve models with medium noise and does not degrade the performance of models with noise outside this range. To our knowledge, our denoising scheme is the first to improve model performance for ADMET data and has implications for improving models for experimental assay data in general.