Neighborhood Regularized Logistic Matrix Factorization for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

In pharmaceutical sciences, a crucial step of the drug discovery process is the identification of drug-target interactions. However, only a small portion of the drug-target interactions have been experimentally validated, as the experimental validation is laborious and costly. To improve the drug discovery efficiency, there is a great need for the development of accurate computational approaches that can predict potential drug-target interactions to direct the experimental verification. In this paper, we propose a novel drug-target interaction prediction algorithm, namely neighborhood regularized logistic matrix factorization (NRLMF). Specifically, the proposed NRLMF method focuses on modeling the probability that a drug would interact with a target by logistic matrix factorization, where the properties of drugs and targets are represented by drug-specific and target-specific latent vectors, respectively. Moreover, NRLMF assigns higher importance levels to positive observations (i.e., the observed interacting drug-target pairs) than negative observations (i.e., the unknown pairs). Because the positive observations are already experimentally verified, they are usually more trustworthy. Furthermore, the local structure of the drug-target interaction data has also been exploited via neighborhood regularization to achieve better prediction accuracy. We conducted extensive experiments over four benchmark datasets, and NRLMF demonstrated its effectiveness compared with five state-of-the-art approaches.Author Summary: This work introduces a computational approach, namely neighborhood regularized logistic matrix factorization (NRLMF), to predicting potential interactions between drugs and targets. The novelty of NRLMF lies in integrating logistic matrix factorization with neighborhood regularization for drug-target interaction prediction. In NRLMF, we model the interaction probability for each drug-target pair using logistic matrix factorization. As the observed interacting drug-target pairs are experimentally verified, they are more trustworthy than the unknown pairs. We propose to assign higher importance levels to interaction pairs and lower importance levels to unknown pairs. In addition, we further improve the prediction accuracy by neighborhood regularization, which considers the neighborhood influences from most similar drugs and most similar targets. To evaluate the performance of NRLMF, we conducted extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets. The experimental results demonstrated that NRLMF usually outperformed five state-of-the-art methods under three different cross-validation settings, in terms of the area under the ROC curve (AUC) and the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPR). In addition, we confirmed the practical prediction ability of NRLMF by mapping with the latest version of four online biological databases, including ChEMBL, DrugBank, KEGG, and Matador.