Prediction of Protein-Protein Interactions with Physicochemical Descriptors and Wavelet Transform via Random Forests

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) provide valuable insight into the inner workings of cells, and it is significant to study the network of PPIs. It is vitally important to develop an automated method as a high-throughput tool to timely predict PPIs. Based on the physicochemical descriptors, a protein was converted into several digital signals, and then wavelet transform was used to analyze them. With such a formulation frame to represent the samples of protein sequences, the random forests algorithm was adopted to conduct prediction. The results on a large-scale independent-test data set show that the proposed model can achieve a good performance with an accuracy value of about 0.86 and a geometric mean value of about 0.85. Therefore, it can be a usefully supplementary tool for PPI prediction. The predictor used in this article is freely available at http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/PPI_RF.