Drug-target interaction prediction based on drug fingerprint information and protein sequence

The identification of drug-target interactions (DTIs) is a critical step in drug development. Experimental methods that are based on clinical trials to discover DTIs are time-consuming, expensive, and challenging. Therefore, as complementary to it, developing new computational methods for predicting novel DTI is of great significance with regards to saving cost and shortening the development period. In this paper, we present a novel computational model for predicting DTIs, which uses the sequence information of proteins and a rotation forest classifier. Specifically, all of the target protein sequences are first converted to a position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM) to retain evolutionary information. We then use local phase quantization (LPQ) descriptors to extract evolutionary information in the PSSM. On the other hand, substructure fingerprint information is utilized to extract the features of the drug. We finally combine the features of drugs and protein together to represent features of each drug-target pair and use a rotation forest classifier to calculate the scores of interaction possibility, for a global DTI prediction. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model is effective, achieving average accuracies of 89.15%, 86.01%, 82.20%, and 71.67% on four datasets (i.e., enzyme, ion channel, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR), and nuclear receptor), respectively. In addition, we compared the prediction performance of the rotation forest classifier with another popular classifier, support vector machine, on the same dataset. Several types of methods previously proposed are also implemented on the same datasets for performance comparison. The comparison results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to the others. We anticipate that the proposed method can be used as an effective tool for predicting drug-target interactions on a large scale, given the information of protein sequences and drug fingerprints.