Predictive Modeling of Cancer Cell Growth Kinetics with Machine Learning
In the authors' words
Quantitative characterization of cell proliferation is central to preclinical drug discovery. Here, we evaluated Random Forest (RF) regression for predicting confluence-based cell growth trends using data from human cancer cell lines and benchmarked its performance against the widely used logistic and Gompertz models. The RF model achieved higher predictive accuracy within the evaluated dataset, particularly at higher initial seeding densities. We further extended the RF framework to predict growth curves across seeding densities. Collectively, these findings highlight the potential of data-driven modeling to complement conventional mathematical approaches and support more informed cell-culture design.
Appeared: Saturday, September 26. bioRxiv. Preprint, not yet peer-reviewed.