A quantile regression forest based method to predict drug response and assess prediction reliability

PLoS One. 2018 Oct 5;13(10):e0205155. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205155. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Drug response prediction is a critical step for personalized treatment of cancer patients and ultimately leads to precision medicine. A lot of machine-learning based methods have been proposed to predict drug response from different types of genomic data. However, currently available methods could only give a "point" prediction of drug response value but fail to provide the reliability and distribution of the prediction, which are of equal interest in clinical practice. In this paper, we proposed a method based on quantile regression forest and applied it to the CCLE dataset. Through the out-of-bag validation, our method achieved much higher prediction accuracy of drug response than other available tools. The assessment of prediction reliability by prediction intervals and its significance in personalized medicine were illustrated by several examples. Functional analysis of selected drug response associated genes showed that the proposed method achieves more biologically plausible results.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Validation Study

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Cell Line, Tumor
  • Drug Resistance
  • Drug Therapy / methods*
  • Humans
  • Models, Biological
  • Neoplasms / drug therapy
  • Neoplasms / genetics
  • Neoplasms / metabolism
  • Precision Medicine / methods*
  • Regression Analysis
  • Reproducibility of Results

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11201306(YF), 61572327(XZ), 61702325(YQ) and 11501099(PX)), the Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (13YZ065(YF)).