Predicting adverse drug reactions of combined medication from heterogeneous pharmacologic databases

Background Early and accurate identification of potential adverse drug reactions (ADRs) for combined medication is vital for public health. Existing methods either rely on expensive wet-lab experiments or detecting existing associations from related records. Thus, they inevitably suffer under-reporting, delays in reporting, and inability to detect ADRs for new and rare drugs. The current application of machine learning methods is severely impeded by the lack of proper drug representation and credible negative samples. Therefore, a method to represent drugs properly and to select credible negative samples becomes vital in applying machine learning methods to this problem.