Title: Fréchet ChemNet Distance: A metric for generative models for molecules in drug discovery,
Abstract: The new wave of successful generative models in machine learning has
increased the interest in deep learning driven de novo drug design. However,
assessing the performance of such generative models is notoriously difficult.
Metrics that are typically used to assess the performance of such generative
models are the percentage of chemically valid molecules or the similarity to
real molecules in terms of particular descriptors, such as the partition
coefficient (logP) or druglikeness. However, method comparison is difficult
because of the inconsistent use of evaluation metrics, the necessity for
multiple metrics, and the fact that some of these measures can easily be
tricked by simple rule-based systems. We propose a novel distance measure
between two sets of molecules, called Fréchet ChemNet distance (FCD), that
can be used as an evaluation metric for generative models. The FCD is similar
to a recently established performance metric for comparing image generation
methods, the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID). Whereas the FID uses one of
the hidden layers of InceptionNet, the FCD utilizes the penultimate layer of a
deep neural network called ChemNet, which was trained to predict drug
activities. Thus, the FCD metric takes into account chemically and biologically
relevant information about molecules, and also measures the diversity of the
set via the distribution of generated molecules. The FCD's advantage over
previous metrics is that it can detect if generated molecules are a) diverse
and have similar b) chemical and c) biological properties as real molecules. We
further provide an easy-to-use implementation that only requires the SMILES
representation of the generated molecules as input to calculate the FCD.
Implementations are available at: this https URL