Tensor Factorisation for Polypharmacy Side Effect Prediction

Adverse reactions caused by drug combinations are an increasingly common phenomenon, making their accurate prediction an important challenge in modern medicine. However, the polynomial nature of this problem renders lab-based identification of adverse reactions insufficient. Dozens of computational approaches have therefore been proposed for the task in recent years, with varying degrees of success. One group of methods that has seemingly been under-utilised in this area is tensor factorisation, despite their clear applicability to this type of data. In this work, we apply three such models to a benchmark dataset in order to compare them against established techniques. We find, in contrast to previous reports, that for this task tensor factorisation models are competitive with state-of-the-art graph neural network models and we recommend that future work in this field considers cheaper methods with linear complexity before running costly deep learning processes.