Help enable the development of safe, effective medicines.
When
[developing new medicines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_discovery)
it is important to identify molecules that are highly active toward their intended targets but not toward other targets that might cause side effects.
 The objective of this competition is to identify the best statistical techniques for predicting biological activities of different molecules, both on- and off-target, given numerical descriptors generated from their chemical structures
.
The challenge is based on 15 molecular activity data sets, each for a biologically relevant target. Each row corresponds to a molecule and contains descriptors derived from that molecule's chemical structure.
In addition to the prediction competition, Merck is also hosting a
[visualization challenge](https://www.kaggle.com/c/MerckActivity/prospector)
with a $2,000 prize for the most insightful and elegant graphical representations of the data.
Prizes total
$40,000
.