PPDTS: Predicting potential drug-target interactions based on network similarity

Identification of drug-target interactions (DTIs) has great practical importance in the drug discovery process for known diseases. However, only a small proportion of DTIs in these databases has been verified experimentally, and the computational methods for predicting the interactions remain challenging. As a result, some effective computational models have become increasingly popular for predicting DTIs. In this work, the authors predict potential DTIs from the local structure of drug-target associations' network, which is different from the traditional global network similarity methods based on structure and ligand. A novel method called PPDTS is proposed to predict DTIs. First, according to the DTIs' network local structure, the known DTIs are converted into a binary network. Second, the Resource Allocation algorithm is used to obtain a drug-drug similarity network and a target-target similarity network. Third, a Collaborative Filtering algorithm is used with the known drug-target topology information to obtain similarity scores. Fourth, the linear combination of drug-target similarity model and the target-drug similarity model are innovatively proposed to obtain the final prediction results. Finally, the experimental performance of PPDTS has proved to be higher than that of the previously mentioned four popular network-based similarity methods, which is validated in different experimental datasets. Some of the predicted results can be supported in UniProt and DrugBank databases.