Uncertainty-Aware Modeling for Improving Prediction of Toxicity
Xinlei Zhou, Xizhao Wang, Xinpeng Zhou, Siwu Tu, Ranwang · 2024
Accurately predicting molecular toxicity is challenging in drug discovery and chemical safety assessment. Except for the representation of molecular structure, the inherent class imbalance and uncertainty often complicate the task. In this work, we present UnBGMT (Uncertainty-Aware Balanced Graph Multi-set Transformer), which integrates uncertainty modeling into the Graph Multiset Transformer (GMT) framework to improve the reliability and accuracy of molecular toxicity predictions. Our method employs Monte Carlo dropout (MC dropout) to evaluate uncertainty, which is then used to guide an adaptive loss function that adjusts weights in training. This approach guides the model to focus on the minority and samples with middle-level uncer-tainty, mitigating issues related to class imbalance and improving model stability. We conducted sufficient experiments on the Tox21 dataset, demonstrating the superiority of UnBGMT by comparing performance with baseline models and conducting ablation studies. Our results highlight the benefits of incorporating uncertainty in toxicity prediction, which provides a deeper insight into the im-pact of uncertainty on model performance.