Recent advances in machine learning
have made significant contributions to drug discovery. Deep neural
networks in particular have been demonstrated to provide significant
boosts in predictive power when inferring the properties and activities
of small-molecule compounds (25635324J. Chem. Inf. Model.201555263274). However, the applicability of these techniques has been limited
by the requirement for large amounts of training data. In this work,
we demonstrate how one-shot learning can be used to significantly
lower the amounts of data required to make meaningful predictions
in drug discovery applications. We introduce a new architecture, the
iterative refinement long short-term memory, that, when combined with
graph convolutional neural networks, significantly improves learning
of meaningful distance metrics over small-molecules. We open source
all models introduced in this work as part of DeepChem, an open-source
framework for deep-learning in drug discovery (Ramsundar,
B. deepchem.io. https://github.com/deepchem/deepchem, 2016).
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