Improving the Prediction of Adverse Drug Events Using Feature Fusion-Based Predictive Network Models

Computational strategies play a vital role in the prediction of adverse drug events (ADEs) owing to their low cost and increased efficiency. In this study, we used the strengths of the Jaccard and Adamic–Adar indices to build feature fusion-based predictive network models (FFPNMs) with three different machine learning (ML) methods respectively to predict drug–ADE associations. Our FFPNM with the logistic regression (LR) model improved to an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) value of 0.849, while the corresponding AUROC values for the pharmacological network model (PNM) and model based on similarity measures were 0.824 and 0.821, respectively. FFPNM with random forest (RF) is the best model among them with an AUROC value of 0.856, and the performance of FFPNM with SVM is close to that of FFPNM with RF and higher than that of FFPNM with LR. In these models, the bipartite network consisted of 152 drugs and 633 ADEs, which were obtained from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) 2010 dataset. To better evaluate the performance of FFPNMs, we performed model predictions by different network consisting of 1177 drugs and 97 ADEs which were from the data of the first 120 days of FAERS 2004. FFPNM with RF achieved the best predictive result with AUROC value of 0.913. The results show that FFPNMs with ML methods, specially RF, have a superior prediction performance and robustness using only the topology features of the drug–ADE network. From our findings, the optimal, concise, and efficient models as computational methods for drug-ADE association predictions, were revealed. Source codes of this paper are available on https://github.com/Coderljl/FFPNM .