System, apparatus, and method for user tunable and selectable searching of a database using a weigthted quantized feature vector

摘要

The invention disclosed herein concerns a data processing means for user tunable and selectable searching of a database wherein the data contained therein have associated descriptive properties capable of being expressed in numeric form. A quantized vector representative of the descriptive properties is created for each item in the database. This quantized vector becomes the fingerprint for each data item. The user submits a query item to be matched against the database for similarity. A fingerprint is calculated for the query item. The user may then assign weights to the individual descriptive properties based upon perceived importance. A newly weighted fingerprint for the query item is then compared with the weighted fingerprints for all the data in the database. A list of results sorted in order of decreasing similarity is presented to the user. The user may then change the previously assigned weights and then re-run the similarity search. This may be done as often as necessary to achieve the desired results. The invention describes similarity searching in a generic database. However, this invention is particularly desirable in databases containing chemical compound structure data or biological response screening result data. The process described herein may be run stand alone or as a preliminary screening search in a large database. If used for screening, it can greatly reduce the amount of data required for exactly matching a query item to the data in the database.