Understanding Adverse Biological Effect Predictions Using Knowledge Graphs

Extrapolation of adverse biological (toxic) effects of chemicals is an important contribution to expand available hazard data in (eco)toxicology without the use of animals in laboratory experiments. In this work, we extrapolate effects based on a knowledge graph (KG) consisting of the most relevant effect data as domain-specific background knowledge. An effect prediction model, with and without background knowledge, was used to predict mean adverse biological effect concentration of chemicals as a prototypical type of stressors. The background knowledge improves the model prediction performance by up to 40% in terms of R2 (ie coefficient of determination). We use the KG and KG embeddings to provide quantitative and qualitative insights into the predictions. These insights are expected to improve the confidence in effect prediction. Larger scale implementation of such extrapolation models should be expected to support hazard and risk assessment, by simplifying and reducing testing needs.