Chemical Induced Differential Gene Expression Prediction on LINCS Database

Understanding the mechanism of action for drugs is vital for drug discovery. Identifying the effect of drugs on gene expression can shed light on the system-side influence of the chemical compounds in biological organisms. In this paper, we propose to use multi-task neural networks to predict chemical induced differential gene expression on cancer cell lines based solely on features of chemicals. Our model predicts differential gene expression identified by a method called Characteristic Direction on a large scale chemical induced gene expression database (LINCS L1000). The results show that the multi-task networks outperform the other single task baselines. We also compare different representations of chemicals and report effect of clustering genes on the prediction performance.