{
  "id": 2562,
  "title": "2 Newbie Questions",
  "url": "/competitions/MerckActivity/discussion/2562",
  "author_name": "",
  "post_date": "2012-09-04T10:48:21.023Z",
  "votes": null,
  "comment_count": 2,
  "views": 1863,
  "content": "<p>I just want to sanity check that my interpretation of the data set is correct, so I've got a couple of hopefully quick questions:</p>\r\n<p>1. &nbsp;Does the fact that the Activity metric is not comparable across different data sets mean that one can think of this task as 15 completely independent data sets. &nbsp;i.e. the fact that some molecules and descriptors are common across data sets cannot actually\r\n by used for anythign useful?</p>\r\n<p>2. &nbsp;What's a humanly useful intepretation of a descriptor? &nbsp;As these are not binary values, can anything be inferred from the fact that one molecule has more of one descriptor than another, or is this more properly interpreted as a class label rather than\r\n a numeric value?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Thanks for any help in advance.&nbsp;</p>",
  "messages": [
    {
      "id": "13867",
      "postDate": "09/04/2012 10:48:21",
      "content": "<p>I just want to sanity check that my interpretation of the data set is correct, so I've got a couple of hopefully quick questions:</p>\r\n<p>1. &nbsp;Does the fact that the Activity metric is not comparable across different data sets mean that one can think of this task as 15 completely independent data sets. &nbsp;i.e. the fact that some molecules and descriptors are common across data sets cannot actually\r\n by used for anythign useful?</p>\r\n<p>2. &nbsp;What's a humanly useful intepretation of a descriptor? &nbsp;As these are not binary values, can anything be inferred from the fact that one molecule has more of one descriptor than another, or is this more properly interpreted as a class label rather than\r\n a numeric value?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Thanks for any help in advance.&nbsp;</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "13870",
      "postDate": "09/04/2012 12:50:02",
      "content": "Num1: I don't see any reason you couldn't make one very large dataset with 15 responses. Many of the features would be missing for many of the observations however. I contemplated doing this, but then didn't want to mess with the imputation work. If you\r\n did jump that hoop though, there are methods to optimize multivariate Gaussian responses. You'd likely have to downweight the activities with more observations to get the proper balance of shrinkage to match the equal activity weighting in the evaluation metric.\r\n Num2: I doubt they'll actually release that. However, I imagine they represent results from molecular assays. Something like &quot;how often / in how many places did this molecule bond with X?&quot; I'm personally treating this as a black box exercise, but I wouldn't\r\n be surprised if someone could extract insight from this.",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "13871",
      "postDate": "09/04/2012 13:06:37",
      "content": "<p>Ok, looks like I'm roughly in the neighbourhood of the right page. Many thanks!</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "",
      "votes": null
    }
  ],
  "comments": [
    {
      "id": 13870,
      "author_name": "biasvariance",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "09/04/2012 12:50:02",
      "content": "Num1: I don't see any reason you couldn't make one very large dataset with 15 responses. Many of the features would be missing for many of the observations however. I contemplated doing this, but then didn't want to mess with the imputation work. If you\r\n did jump that hoop though, there are methods to optimize multivariate Gaussian responses. You'd likely have to downweight the activities with more observations to get the proper balance of shrinkage to match the equal activity weighting in the evaluation metric.\r\n Num2: I doubt they'll actually release that. However, I imagine they represent results from molecular assays. Something like &quot;how often / in how many places did this molecule bond with X?&quot; I'm personally treating this as a black box exercise, but I wouldn't\r\n be surprised if someone could extract insight from this.",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    },
    {
      "id": 13871,
      "author_name": "s445203",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "09/04/2012 13:06:37",
      "content": "<p>Ok, looks like I'm roughly in the neighbourhood of the right page. Many thanks!</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": []
    }
  ],
  "raw_markdown_by_id": {
    "13867": "",
    "13870": "",
    "13871": ""
  },
  "source": "meta"
}