Multi-Task Cascade Forest Framework for Predicting Acute Toxicity across Species.

Evaluating chemical toxicity and its potential hazards to human health and the environment is essential in diverse fields, including medicine, industry, and agriculture. Multi-species acute toxicity prediction (MSATP) is critical in toxicity assessment. Traditional methods rely on exposing animals to a single high dose of a compound and observing its toxicity. However, with growing ethical concerns regarding animal testing, advancements in computational technology have positioned the artificial intelligence-based MSATP as an efficient alternative. Current research on MSATP commonly employs multi-task deep neural networks for modeling. However, the small size, high dimensionality, and sparsity of MSATP tabular data render them unsuitable for neural network approaches. To address this, we proposed a multi-task cascade forest framework for MSATP. This framework integrated feature enhancement through knowledge transfer, sample enhancement using a greedy search strategy with the covariance distance measure. The framework accommodated tasks of varying sizes in multi-task learning and was specifically designed for tabular data, achieving a 12% improvement in performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods (