Random Forest to Predict Eucalyptus as a Potential Herb in Preventing Covid19

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic had been on the rise since the beginning of 2020. In Indonesia itself, the first case was identified on 3rd March 2020, then peaked at around the end of January 2021. Even though the recent number of covid-19 cases is not as much as the peak time, the positive case has been increasing from around 2600 to 6300 cases every day in the last month. This phenomenon is urging people to take better care of their health. One of the alternatives Indonesian takes to maintain and increase their health is using herbal medicine. Indonesia is one of the countries with a flourishing number of herbal species. Eucalyptus is one of herbal plants with lots of benefits. Even before the pandemic eucalyptus oil has been used for daily use by many in Indonesia. In this study, we predict the compounds in eucalyptus which have any interaction with protein in SARS-COV-2 virus using machine learning method, namely Random Forest. This is one of the applications of the drug-discovery method, drug repurposing, which used existing drug-target interaction data as a model to predict drug compounds with unidentified interaction with targets. Applying this method, we predicted some compounds found in eucalyptus, such as alpha-terpinene, and 1,8-cineole might have an interaction with covid-19 protein thus eucalyptus can be used as a preventive measure.