Before revision:  Using only SMILESVec, which is a strictly string based representation of the proteins based on their interacting ligands, we were able to predict drug-target binding affinity as well as or better than the KronRLS or SimBoost models that utilize protein sequence .
After revision:  Using only SMILESVec, which is a strictly string based representation of the proteins based on their interacting ligands, we were able to predict drug-target binding affinity as well as or better than state-of-the-art machine learning systems. When powered with ligand-centric representations, ChemBoost was more robust to the changes in protein sequence similarity and successfully captured the interactions between a protein and a ligand, even if the protein has low sequence similarity to the known targets of the ligand .