Drug-target interaction prediction with tree-ensemble learning and output space reconstruction.

Journal: BMC bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Computational prediction of drug-target interactions (DTI) is vital for drug discovery. The experimental identification of interactions between drugs and target proteins is very onerous. Modern technologies have mitigated the problem, leveraging the development of new drugs. However, drug development remains extremely expensive and time consuming. Therefore, in silico DTI predictions based on machine learning can alleviate the burdensome task of drug development. Many machine learning approaches have been proposed over the years for DTI prediction. Nevertheless, prediction accuracy and efficiency are persisting problems that still need to be tackled. Here, we propose a new learning method which addresses DTI prediction as a multi-output prediction task by learning ensembles of multi-output bi-clustering trees (eBICT) on reconstructed networks. In our setting, the nodes of a DTI network (drugs and proteins) are represented by features (background information). The interactions between the nodes of a DTI network are modeled as an interaction matrix and compose the output space in our problem. The proposed approach integrates background information from both drug and target protein spaces into the same global network framework.

Authors

  • Konstantinos Pliakos
    KU Leuven, Campus KULAK, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Faculty of Medicine, 8500 Kortrijk, Belgium. Electronic address: konstantinos.pliakos@kuleuven.be.
  • Celine Vens
    Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.