A Bayesian neural network for toxicity prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Predicting the toxicity of a compound preclinically enables better decision making, thereby reducing development costs and increasing patient safety. It is a complex issue, but in vitro assays and physico-chemical properties of compounds can be used to predict clinical toxicity. Neural networks (NNs) are a popular predictive tool due to their flexibility and ability to model non-linearities, but they are prone to overfitting and therefore are not recommended for small data sets. Furthermore, they don’t quantify uncertainty in the predictions. Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are able to avoid these pitfalls by using prior distributions on the parameters of a NN model and representing uncertainty about the predictions in the form of a distribution. We model the severity of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) to provide an example of a BNN performing better than a traditional but less flexible proportional odds logistic regression (POLR) model. We use appropriate metrics to evaluate predictions of the ordinal data type. To demonstrate the effect of a hierarchical prior for BNNs as an alternative to hyperparameter optimisation for NNs, we compare the performance of a BNN against NNs with dropout or penalty regularisation. We reduce the task to multiclass classification in order to be able to perform this comparison. A BNN trained for the multiclass classification produces poorer results than a BNN that captures the order. The current work lays a foundation for more complex models built on larger datasets, but can already be adopted by safety pharmacologists for risk quantification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".