LCM-DS: A novel approach of predicting drug-drug interactions for new drugs via Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence

There is an urgent need to discover or predict DDIs, which would cause serious adverse drug reactions. However, preclinical detection of DDIs bear high cost. Similarity-based computational approaches can be the assistance of experimental approaches. Utilizing pre-market drug similarities, they are able to predict DDIs on a large scale. However, they neglect the topological structure among DDIs and non-DDIs and have a burden of slow training and much memory. Or, they bear the bias that the pairs between a newly-given drug and the drugs having many DDIs tend to obtain high ranks. More importantly, they lack an effective combination of multiple predictions. To address these issues, we develop a local classification-based model (LCM), which has the advantages of faster training, less memory requirement as well as no that bias. We further design a novel supervised algorithm of fusion based on Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory of evidence for combine multiple predictions. Finally, the experiments demonstrate that our LCM-DS is significantly superior to three state-of-the-art approaches and outperforms both individual LCMs and classical fusion algorithms.