DCE-DForest: A Deep Forest Model for the Prediction of Anticancer Drug Combination Effects

Drug combinations have recently been studied intensively due to their critical role in cancer treatment. Computational prediction of drug synergy has become a popular alternative strategy to experimental methods for anticancer drug synergy predictions. In this paper, a deep learning model called DCE-DForest is proposed to predict the synergistic effect of drug combinations. To sufficiently extract drug information, the paper leverages BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to encode the drug and the deep forest to model the nonlinear relationship between the drugs and cell lines. The experimental results on the synergy datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently shows superior performance over the other machine learning models.