Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

Committee Chair

Vineetha Menon

Committee Member

Ramazan Aygun

Committee Member

Jerome Baudry

Subject(s)

Machine learning, Drug development, Bioinformatics

Abstract

Drug discovery refers to the process of identification of specific-disease causing proteins and underscores the research efforts to derive a new medication that targets these proteins. As such the drug discovery process entails significant Big Data challenges as it is time consuming, data intensive, and involves an expensive developmental process which demands rigorous lab testing with high rates of uncertainty that the given drug will succeed. Therefore, it highlights the crucial need for machine learning methods to automate and hasten the drug discovery pipeline for improved healthcare and assist clinicians to make informed decisions for in-vitro testing. However, most real-world biomedical datasets suffer from statistical ill-conditioning issues such as the class imbalance problem where the fewer class of potential drug candidate protein conformations are overshadowed by the larger protein-pool of non-drug candidates. Hence, this leads to erroneous conclusions when machine learning techniques are directly employed for data-learning and classification purposes. This research work takes a revolutionary stance to counter the class imbalance problem through advanced machine learning techniques that maximize the prediction rate of potential drug candidate molecular conformations for the target proteins ADORA2A, OPRK1 and subsequently reduces the failure rates of the drug discovery process. Experimental evaluation of the proposed machine learning methodologies further substantiates the effectiveness of our approach for drug discovery process.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.