Bioactivity-driven prediction of antibacterial synergy using machine learning models

Motivation Combination therapies have demonstrated improved efficacy across diverse clinical settings. Predicting antibacterial drug synergy remains difficult due to strain variability and the limited scale of experimentally tested combinations. Existing machine-learning approaches for synergy prediction often rely on permissive cross-validation schemes that allow drug pairs to re-appear across folds, leading to inflated performance metrics. A rigorous evaluation framework and scalable feature representation are needed for robust generalization. Results We assembled a curated dataset of 3,160 drug–pair–strain interactions covering 97 antibacterial compounds and 10 bacterial strains. We then developed HALO ( Held-out Antibacterial interaction Learning from latent bioactivity Observations ), a synergy-prediction framework in which each drug pair is encoded using multi-level Chemical Checker (CC) similarity features spanning chemical, targets, networks, cellular, and clinical bioactivity domains. Using strictly nested, drug-pair heldout cross validation with fold-internal feature selection, HALO achieved consistent generalization to unseen combinations (ROC–AUC = 0.78). Performance dropped notably under increasingly stringent heldout schemes and inflated under random data splits, underscoring the importance of rigorous evaluation for this task. Despite these conservative conditions, HALO transferred to two independent datasets, achieving ROC–AUC = 0.90 and 0.71 and average precision = 0.76 and 0.94 for distinguishing synergy from antagonism. Together, these results demonstrate that multi-level bioactivity signatures provide a scalable, interpretable basis for predicting antibacterial relationships, while clarifying the realistic performance limits of current models under truly leakage-free evaluation.