Machine-learning techniques for the prediction of protein–protein interactions

Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are important for the study of protein functions and pathways involved in different biological processes, as well as for understanding the cause and progression of diseases. Several high-throughput experimental techniques have been employed for the identification of PPIs in a few model organisms, but still, there is a huge gap in identifying all possible binary PPIs in an organism. Therefore, PPI prediction using machine-learning algorithms has been used in conjunction with experimental methods for discovery of novel protein interactions. The two most popular supervised machine-learning techniques used in the prediction of PPIs are support vector machines and random forest classifiers. Bayesian-probabilistic inference has also been used but mainly for the scoring of high-throughput PPI dataset confidence measures. Recently, deep-learning algorithms have been used for sequence-based prediction of PPIs. Several clustering methods such as hierarchical and k-means are useful as unsupervised machine-learning algorithms for the prediction of interacting protein pairs without explicit data labelling. In summary, machine-learning techniques have been widely used for the prediction of PPIs thus allowing experimental researchers to study cellular PPI networks.