Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction plays a very important role in drug development and drug discovery. Biochemical experiments or \textit{in vitro} methods are very expensive, laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, \textit{in silico} approaches including docking simulation and machine learning have been proposed to solve this problem. In particular, machine learning approaches have attracted increasing attentions recently. However, in addition to the known drug-target interactions, most of the machine learning methods require extra characteristic information such as chemical structures, genome sequences, binding types and so on. Whenever such information is not available, they may perform poor. Very recently, the similarity-based link prediction methods were extended to bipartite networks, which can be applied to solve the DTI prediction problem by using topological information only. In this work, we propose a method based on low-rank matrix projection to solve the DTI prediction problem. On one hand, when there is no extra characteristic information of drugs or targets, the proposed method utilizes only the known interactions. On the other hand, the proposed method can also utilize the extra characteristic information when it is available and the performances will be remarkably improved. Moreover, the proposed method can predict the interactions associated with new drugs or targets of which we know nothing about their associated interactions, but only some characteristic information. We compare the proposed method with ten baseline methods, e.g., six similarity-based methods that utilize only the known interactions and four methods that utilize the extra characteristic information. The datasets and codes implementing the simulations are available at this https URL.
Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction plays a very important role in drug development and drug discovery. Biochemical experiments or \textit{in vitro} methods are very expensive, laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, \textit{in silico} approaches including docking simulation and machine learning have been proposed to solve this problem. In particular, machine learning approaches have attracted increasing attentions recently. However, in addition to the known drug-target interactions, most of the machine learning methods require extra characteristic information such as chemical structures, genome sequences, binding types and so on. Whenever such information is not available, they may perform poor. Very recently, the similarity-based link prediction methods were extended to bipartite networks, which can be applied to solve the DTI prediction problem by using topological information only. In this work, we propose a method based on low-rank matrix projection to solve the DTI prediction problem. On one hand, when there is no extra characteristic information of drugs or targets, the proposed method utilizes only the known interactions. On the other hand, the proposed method can also utilize the extra characteristic information when it is available and the performances will be remarkably improved. Moreover, the proposed method can predict the interactions associated with new drugs or targets of which we know nothing about their associated interactions, but only some characteristic information. We compare the proposed method with ten baseline methods, e.g., six similarity-based methods that utilize only the known interactions and four methods that utilize the extra characteristic information. The datasets and codes implementing the simulations are available at https://github.com/rathapech/DTI_LMP.
Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction plays a very important role in drug development. Biochemical experiments or in vitro methods to identify such interactions are very expensive, laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, in silico approaches including docking simulation and machine learning have been proposed to solve this problem. In particular, machine learning approaches have attracted increasing attentions recently. However, in addition to the known drug-target interactions, most of the machine learning methods require extra information such as chemical structures, genome sequences, binding types and so on. Whenever such information is not available, they may perform poor. Very recently, the similarity-based link prediction methods were extended to bipartite networks, which can be applied to solve the DTI prediction problem by using topological information only. In this work, we propose a sparse learning method to solve the DTI prediction problem, which does not require extra information and performs much better than similarity-based methods. We compare the proposed method with similarity-based methods including common neighbor index, Katz index and Jaccard index on the DTI prediction problem over the four renowned and benchmark datasets. The proposed method performs remarkably better. The results suggest that although the proposed method utilizes only the known drug-target interactions, it performs very satisfactorily. The method is very suitable to predict the potential uses of the existing drugs, especially, when extra information about the drugs and targets is not available.
Abstract MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been playing a crucial role in many important biological processes e.g., pathogenesis of diseases. Currently, the validated associations between miRNAs and diseases are insufficient comparing to the hidden associations. Testing all these hidden associations by biological experiments is expensive, laborious, and time consuming. Therefore, computationally inferring hidden associations from biological datasets for further laboratory experiments has attracted increasing interests from different communities ranging from biological to computational science. In this work, we propose an effective and efficient method to predict associations between miRNAs and diseases, namely linear optimization (LOMDA). The proposed method uses the heterogenous matrix incorporating of miRNA functional similarity information, disease similarity information and known miRNA-disease associations. Compared with the other methods, LOMDA performs best in terms of AUC (0.970), precision (0.566), and accuracy (0.971) in average over 15 diseases in local 5-fold cross-validation. Moreover, LOMDA has also been applied to two types of case studies. In the first case study, 30 predictions from breast neoplasms, 24 from colon neoplasms, and 26 from kidney neoplasms among top 30 predicted miRNAs are confirmed. In the second case study, for new diseases without any known associations, top 30 predictions from hepatocellular carcinoma and 29 from lung neoplasms among top 30 predicted miRNAs are confirmed. Author summary Identifying associations between miRNAs and diseases is significant in investigation of pathogenesis, diagnosis, treatment and preventions of related diseases. Employing computational methods to predict the hidden associations based on known associations and focus on those predicted associations can sharply reduce the experimental costs. We developed a computational method LOMDA based on the linear optimization technique to predict the hidden associations. In addition to the observed associations, LOMDA also can employ the auxiliary information (diseases and miRNAs similarity information) flexibly and effectively. Numerical experiments on global 5-fold cross validation show that the use of the auxiliary information can greatly improve the prediction performance. Meanwhile, the result on local 5-fold cross validation shows that LOMDA performs best among the seven related methods. We further test the prediction performance of LOMDA for two types of diseases based on HDMMv2.0 (2014), including (i) diseases with all the known associations, and (ii) new diseases without known associations. Three independent or updated databases (dbDEMC, 2010; miR2Disease, 2009; HDMMv3.2, 2019) are introduced to evaluate the prediction results. As a result, most miRNAs for target diseases are confirmed by at least one of the three databases. So, we believe that LOMDA can guide experiments to identify the hidden miRNA-disease associations.