6 research outputs found
Quantitative toxicity prediction using topology based multi-task deep neural networks
The understanding of toxicity is of paramount importance to human health and
environmental protection. Quantitative toxicity analysis has become a new
standard in the field. This work introduces element specific persistent
homology (ESPH), an algebraic topology approach, for quantitative toxicity
prediction. ESPH retains crucial chemical information during the topological
abstraction of geometric complexity and provides a representation of small
molecules that cannot be obtained by any other method. To investigate the
representability and predictive power of ESPH for small molecules, ancillary
descriptors have also been developed based on physical models. Topological and
physical descriptors are paired with advanced machine learning algorithms, such
as deep neural network (DNN), random forest (RF) and gradient boosting decision
tree (GBDT), to facilitate their applications to quantitative toxicity
predictions. A topology based multi-task strategy is proposed to take the
advantage of the availability of large data sets while dealing with small data
sets. Four benchmark toxicity data sets that involve quantitative measurements
are used to validate the proposed approaches. Extensive numerical studies
indicate that the proposed topological learning methods are able to outperform
the state-of-the-art methods in the literature for quantitative toxicity
analysis. Our online server for computing element-specific topological
descriptors (ESTDs) is available at http://weilab.math.msu.edu/TopTox/Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.1095
Deep Learning-Based Structure-Activity Relationship Modeling for Multi-Category Toxicity Classification: A Case Study of 10K Tox21 Chemicals With High-Throughput Cell-Based Androgen Receptor Bioassay Data
Deep learning (DL) has attracted the attention of computational toxicologists as it offers a potentially greater power for in silico predictive toxicology than existing shallow learning algorithms. However, contradicting reports have been documented. To further explore the advantages of DL over shallow learning, we conducted this case study using two cell-based androgen receptor (AR) activity datasets with 10K chemicals generated from the Tox21 program. A nested double-loop cross-validation approach was adopted along with a stratified sampling strategy for partitioning chemicals of multiple AR activity classes (i.e., agonist, antagonist, inactive, and inconclusive) at the same distribution rates amongst the training, validation and test subsets. Deep neural networks (DNN) and random forest (RF), representing deep and shallow learning algorithms, respectively, were chosen to carry out structure-activity relationship-based chemical toxicity prediction. Results suggest that DNN significantly outperformed RF (p \u3c 0.001, ANOVA) by 22–27% for four metrics (precision, recall, F-measure, and AUPRC) and by 11% for another (AUROC). Further in-depth analyses of chemical scaffolding shed insights on structural alerts for AR agonists/antagonists and inactive/inconclusive compounds, which may aid in future drug discovery and improvement of toxicity prediction modeling
Efficient Toxicity Prediction via Simple Features Using Shallow Neural Networks and Decision Trees
Toxicity prediction of chemical compounds is a grand challenge. Lately, it
achieved significant progress in accuracy but using a huge set of features,
implementing a complex blackbox technique such as a deep neural network, and
exploiting enormous computational resources. In this paper, we strongly argue
for the models and methods that are simple in machine learning characteristics,
efficient in computing resource usage, and powerful to achieve very high
accuracy levels. To demonstrate this, we develop a single task-based chemical
toxicity prediction framework using only 2D features that are less compute
intensive. We effectively use a decision tree to obtain an optimum number of
features from a collection of thousands of them. We use a shallow neural
network and jointly optimize it with decision tree taking both network
parameters and input features into account. Our model needs only a minute on a
single CPU for its training while existing methods using deep neural networks
need about 10 min on NVidia Tesla K40 GPU. However, we obtain similar or better
performance on several toxicity benchmark tasks. We also develop a cumulative
feature ranking method which enables us to identify features that can help
chemists perform prescreening of toxic compounds effectively
Machine Learning Approaches for Improving Prediction Performance of Structure-Activity Relationship Models
In silico bioactivity prediction studies are designed to complement in vivo and in vitro efforts to assess the activity and properties of small molecules. In silico methods such as Quantitative Structure-Activity/Property Relationship (QSAR) are used to correlate the structure of a molecule to its biological property in drug design and toxicological studies. In this body of work, I started with two in-depth reviews into the application of machine learning based approaches and feature reduction methods to QSAR, and then investigated solutions to three common challenges faced in machine learning based QSAR studies.
First, to improve the prediction accuracy of learning from imbalanced data, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and Edited Nearest Neighbor (ENN) algorithms combined with bagging as an ensemble strategy was evaluated. The Friedman’s aligned ranks test and the subsequent Bergmann-Hommel post hoc test showed that this method significantly outperformed other conventional methods. SMOTEENN with bagging became less effective when IR exceeded a certain threshold (e.g., \u3e40). The ability to separate the few active compounds from the vast amounts of inactive ones is of great importance in computational toxicology.
Deep neural networks (DNN) and random forest (RF), representing deep and shallow learning algorithms, respectively, were chosen to carry out structure-activity relationship-based chemical toxicity prediction. Results suggest that DNN significantly outperformed RF (p \u3c 0.001, ANOVA) by 22-27% for four metrics (precision, recall, F-measure, and AUPRC) and by 11% for another (AUROC).
Lastly, current features used for QSAR based machine learning are often very sparse and limited by the logic and mathematical processes used to compute them. Transformer embedding features (TEF) were developed as new continuous vector descriptors/features using the latent space embedding from a multi-head self-attention. The significance of TEF as new descriptors was evaluated by applying them to tasks such as predictive modeling, clustering, and similarity search. An accuracy of 84% on the Ames mutagenicity test indicates that these new features has a correlation to biological activity.
Overall, the findings in this study can be applied to improve the performance of machine learning based Quantitative Structure-Activity/Property Relationship (QSAR) efforts for enhanced drug discovery and toxicology assessments