Predicting Missing and Spurious Protein-Protein Interactions Using Graph Embeddings on GO Annotation Graph

Xiaoshi Zhong, Jagath C. Rajapakse

Abstract: Protein-protein interaction (PPI) prediction is a key step towards many bioinformatics applications including prediction of protein functions and drug-disease interactions. However, previous research on PPI prediction rarely considered missing and spurious interactions in PPI networks. To address these two issues, we define two corresponding tasks, namely missing PPI prediction and spurious PPI prediction, and propose a novel method that employs graph embeddings to learn vector representations from constructed Gene Ontology (GO) annotation graphs. Our method leverages the information from both term-term relations among GO terms and term-protein annotations between GO terms and proteins, and preserves properties of both local and global structural information of the GO annotation graph. We compare our method with methods based on information content and on word embeddings, using three PPI datasets from STRING database. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is more effective than those compared methods.