Incorporating chemical sub-structures and protein evolutionary information for inferring drug-target interactions

Accumulating evidence has shown that drug-target interactions (DTIs) play a crucial role in the process of genomic drug discovery. Although biological experimental technology has made great progress, the identification of DTIs is still very time-consuming and expensive nowadays. Hence it is urgent to develop in silico model as a supplement to the biological experiments to predict the potential DTIs. In this work, a new model is designed to predict DTIs by incorporating chemical sub-structures and protein evolutionary information. Specifically, we first use Position-Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) to convert the protein sequence into the numerical descriptor containing biological evolutionary information, then use Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm to extract the hidden features and integrate them with the chemical sub-structures descriptor, and finally utilize Rotation Forest (RF) classifier to accurately predict whether there is interaction between the drug and the target protein. In the 5-fold cross-validation (CV) experiment, the average accuracy of the proposed model on the benchmark datasets of Enzymes, Ion Channels, GPCRs and Nuclear Receptors reached 0.9140, 0.8919, 0.8724 and 0.8111, respectively. In order to fully evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we compare it with different feature extraction model, classifier model, and other state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, we also implemented case studies. As a result, 8 of the top 10 drug-target pairs with the highest prediction score were confirmed by related databases. These excellent results indicate that the proposed model has outstanding ability in predicting DTIs and can provide reliable candidates for biological experiments.