Predicting protein-protein interactions from multimodal biological data sources via nonnegative matrix tri-factorization

Due to the high false positive rate in the high-throughput experimental methods to discover protein interactions, computational methods are necessary and crucial to complete the interactome expeditiously. However, when building classification models to identify putative protein interactions, compared to the obvious choice of positive samples from truly interacting protein pairs, it is usually very hard to select negative samples, because non-interacting protein pairs refer to those currently without experimental or computational evidence to support a physical interaction or a functional association, which, though, could interact in reality. To tackle this difficulty, instead of using heuristics as in many existing works, in this paper we solve it in a principled way by formulating the protein interaction prediction problem from a new mathematical perspective of view - sparse matrix completion, and propose a novel Nonnegative Matrix Tri-Factorization (NMTF) based matrix completion approach to predict new protein interactions from existing protein interaction networks. Because matrix completion only requires positive samples but not use negative samples, the challenge in existing classification based methods for protein interaction prediction is circumvented. Through using manifold regularization, we further develop our method to integrate different biological data sources, such as protein sequences, gene expressions, protein structure information, etc. Extensive experimental results on Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome show that our new methods outperform related state-of-the-art protein interaction prediction methods.