Debunking the Idea that Ligand Efficiency Indices Are Superior to pIC50 as QSAR Activities

Several papers have appeared in which a ligand efficiency index instead of pIC50 is used as the activity in QSAR. The claim is that better fits and predictions are obtained with ligand efficiency. We show on both public-domain and in-house data sets that the apparent superiority is a statistical artifact that occurs when ligand efficiency indices are correlated with the physical property included in their definition (number of non-hydrogens, ALOGP, TPSA, etc.) and when the property is easier to predict than the original pIC50.