A reliable selection of a representative subset of chemical compounds has been reported to be crucial for numeroustasks in computational chemistry and chemoinformatics. We investigated the usability of an approach on the basisof the k-medoid algorithm for this task and in particular for experimental design and the split between training andvalidation set. We therefore compared the performance of models derived from such a selection to that of modelsderived using several other approaches, such as space-filling design and D-optimal design. We validated the performance on four datasets with different endpoints, representing toxicity, physicochemical properties and others.Compared with the models derived from the compounds selected by the other examined approaches, those derivedwith the k-medoid selection show a high reliability for experimental design, as their performance was constantlyamong the best for all examined datasets. Of all the models derived with all examined approaches, those derivedwith the k-medoid approach were the only ones that showed a significantly improved performance compared witha random selection, for all datasets, the whole examined range of selected compounds and for each dimensionalityof the search space.