Toxicity prediction
using quantitative structure–activity
relationship has achieved significant progress in recent years. However,
most existing machine learning methods in toxicity prediction utilize
only one type of feature representation and one type of neural network,
which essentially restricts their performance. Moreover, methods that
use more than one type of feature representation struggle with the
aggregation of information captured within the features since they
use predetermined aggregation formulas. In this paper, we propose
a deep learning framework for quantitative toxicity prediction using
five individual base deep learning models and their own base feature
representations. We then propose to adopt a meta ensemble approach
using another separate deep learning model to perform aggregation
of the outputs of the individual base deep learning models. We train
our deep learning models in a weighted multitask fashion combining
four quantitative toxicity data sets of LD
50
, IGC
50
, LC
50
, and LC
50
-DM and minimizing the root-mean-square
errors. Compared to the current state-of-the-art toxicity prediction
method TopTox on LD
50
, IGC
50
, and LC
50
-DM, that is, three out of four data sets, our method, respectively,
obtains 5.46, 16.67, and 6.34% better root-mean-square errors, 6.41,
11.80, and 12.16% better mean absolute errors, and 5.21, 7.36, and
2.54% better coefficients of determination. We named our method QuantitativeTox,
and our implementation is available from the GitHub repository
.