Prediction of Anti-Malarial Activity Based on Deep Belief Network

摘要

Malaria is a kind of disease that greatly threatens human health. Nearly half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria. Anti-malarial drugs which are sought, developed and synthesized keep malaria under control, having received increasing attention in drug discovery field. Machine learning techniques have been used widely in drug research and development. On the basis of semi-supervised machine learning for molecular descriptions, this research develops a multilayer deep belief network (DBN) that can be used to identify whether compounds have the anti-malarial activity. Firstly, the influence of feature dimensions on predicting accuracy is discussed. Furthermore, the proposed model is applied to contrast shallow machine learning and supervised machine learning with the similar deep architecture. The research results show that the proposed model can predict anti-malarial activity accurately. The stable performance on the evaluation metrics confirms the practicability of our model. The proposed DBN model performs better than other shallow supervised models and deep supervised models. Moreover, it could be applied to reduce the cost and the time of drug discovery.