Prediction of side effects of drug resistant tuberculosis drugs using multi-label random forest

Abstract

Drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) has become a concern because anti-tuberculosis drugs (ATD) used to treat it can cause side effects in patients. This study aimed to predict the potential side effects of ATD using a multi-label classification approach with a random forest (RF) algorithm. This study used 660 medical record data, including the 14 ATD treatments prescribed to the patients and the six side effects experienced by patients. The model was trained using the best parameters based on the hyperparameter tuning process. The results show that the RF multi-label algorithm can be an alternative for building ATD side effect prediction models because it produces the most optimal performance value compared to the decision tree (DT) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). The area under the curve (AUC) score of all RF multi-label models is above 0.8, which means that all RF multi-label models are considered acceptable and applicable for ATD side effect prediction. In addition, eight features influenced the models based on the average feature importance score of the RF models. This study is expected to help predict the side effects of ATD used to treat DR-TB based on ATD treatment and determine the most promising tree-based machine learning algorithm for predicting ATD side effects.