Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationship Modeling Based on Improving Kernel Ridge Regression

ABSTRACT The quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) as an effective and promising model to better understands the relationship between chemical activity and chemical compounds is usually used in modeling chemical datasets. Kernel ridge regression (KRR) has attracted the interest of scholars recently because of its non‐iterative methodology for problem solving. KRR is a highly regarded and practical machine learning approach that has successfully tackled classification and regression issues. So is a regression method that uses a nonlinear kernel function to define an inner product in a higher‐dimensional transformed space. This allows for generalization performance based on regularization least squares solution. However, the performance of KRR is affected by the choices of the values of the hyper‐parameters that define the type of kernel. This has a major processing cost, uses memory, and is also accompanied by poor accuracy performance when studying the prior methods of determining these hyper‐parameter values. Thus, the main highlighted enhancement in this paper is the enhancement of the coati optimization algorithm by applying elite opposite‐based learning to increase the density of population around the search space to optima for the proper selection of the best hyperparameters. Thus, it is necessary to verify and compare its work with the proposed improvement of KRR in increasing its performance, seven public chemical datasets were used. Based on several assessment criteria, the results show that the proposed improvement is superior to all the baseline methods regarding the classification performance.