Comprehensive evaluation and systematic comparison of Gaussian process (GP) modelling applications in peptide quantitative structure-activity relationship

Peptide quantitative structure-activity relationship (pQSAR) is a specific extension of traditional QSARs from small-molecule drugs to bioactive peptides. Since peptides are linear biopolymers that are essentially different to small-molecule compounds in terms of their structural features such as ordering sequence, large size and intrinsic flexibility, the pQSAR methodology (including structural characterization and regression modelling) should be further exploited relative to traditional QSARs. Gaussian process (GP) serves as a pioneering Bayesian-based machine learning (ML) solution for tackling linear/nonlinear-hybrid regression issues in intricate domains. However, the applications of GP regression in QSAR and, particularly, the pQSAR still remain largely unexplored to date. In this work, we launched a comprehensive pQSAR study with GP regression modelling, aiming to the deep evaluation of GP performance based on different characterizations and also the systematic comparison of GP with other routine MLs. Here, we culled two distinct classes of peptide datasets, which separately comprise 12 panels of sophisticated benchmarks and 46 panels of extended samples, totally containing 8804 peptide samples and systematically resulting in 522 regression models. Our study indicated that the GP can generally provide an effective solution for many pQSAR problems with the potential to promote ML regression modelling in this area, which is comparable with or even better than those widely used methods on both the sophisticated benchmarks and extended samples. In addition, GP also has many advantages as compared to traditional MLs, such as hyperparameter self-consistency, overfitting resistance, interpretable output and estimable uncertainty.