Quantitative Toxicity Prediction via Ensembling of Heterogeneous Predictors

Representing molecules in the form of only one type of features and using those features to predict their activities is one of the most important approaches for machine-learning-based chemical-activity-prediction. For molecular activities like quantitative toxicity prediction, the performance depends on the type of features extracted and the machine learning approach used. For such cases, using one type of features and machine learning model restricts the prediction performance to specific representation and model used. In this paper, we study quantitative toxicity prediction and propose a machine learning model for the same. Our model uses an ensemble of heterogeneous predictors instead of typically using homogeneous predictors. The predictors that we use vary either on the type of features used or on the deep learning architecture employed. Each of these predictors presumably has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of toxicity prediction. Our motivation is to make a combined model that utilizes different types of features and architectures to obtain better collective performance that could go beyond the performance of each individual predictor. We use six predictors in our model and test the model on four standard quantitative toxicity benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art toxicity prediction models in 8 out of 12 accuracy measures. Our experiments show that ensembling heterogeneous predictor improves the performance over single predictors and homogeneous ensembling of single predictors.The results show that each data representation or deep learning based predictor has its own strengths and weaknesses, thus employing a model ensembling multiple heterogeneous predictors could go beyond individual performance of each data representation or each predictor type.