Classification of drugs based on mechanism of action using machine learning techniques

Abstract

The mechanism of action is an important aspect of drug development. It can help scientists in the process of drug discovery. This paper provides a machine learning model to predict the mechanism of action of a drug. The machine learning models used in this paper are Binary Relevance K Nearest Neighbors (Type A and Type B), Multi-label K-Nearest Neighbors and a custom neural network. These machine learning models are evaluated using the mean column-wise log loss. The custom neural network model had the best accuracy with a log loss of 0.01706. This neural network model is integrated into a web application using Flask framework. A user can upload a custom testing features dataset, which contains the gene expression and the cell viability levels. The web application will output the top classes of drugs, along with the scatter plots for each of the drug.