Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a major factor in the development of drugs and the safety of drugs. If the DILI cannot be effectively predicted during the development of the drug, it will cause the drug to be withdrawn from markets. Therefore, DILI is crucial at the early stages of drug research. This work presents a 2-class ensemble classifier model for predicting DILI, with 2D molecular descriptors and fingerprints on a dataset of 450 compounds. The purpose of our study is to investigate which are the key molecular fingerprints that may cause DILI risk, and then to obtain a reliable ensemble model to predict DILI risk with these key factors. Experimental results suggested that 8 molecular fingerprints are very critical for predicting DILI, and also obtained the best ratio of molecular fingerprints to molecular descriptors. The result of the 5-fold cross-validation of the ensemble vote classifier method obtain an accuracy of 77.25%, and the accuracy of the test set was 81.67%. This model could be used for drug-induced liver injury prediction.
Keywords: Drug-induced liver injury; ensemble classifier; molecular fingerprints; quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR).