DTI-RME: a robust and multi-kernel ensemble approach for drug-target interaction prediction

Abstract Background Drug-target interaction (DTI) refers to the specific mechanisms by which drug molecules interact with biological targets within a biological system. Computational methods are widely employed for DTI prediction, as they are time-efficient and resource-saving compared to experiment...

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Main Authors: Yuqing Qian, Xin Zhang, Yizheng Wang, Quan Zou, Chen Cao, Yijie Ding, Xiaoyi Guo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2025-07-01
Series:BMC Biology
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-025-02340-6
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Summary:Abstract Background Drug-target interaction (DTI) refers to the specific mechanisms by which drug molecules interact with biological targets within a biological system. Computational methods are widely employed for DTI prediction, as they are time-efficient and resource-saving compared to experimental approaches. Although numerous DTI prediction methods have achieved promising results, accurately modeling DTIs remains challenging due to three key issues: noisy interaction labels, ineffective multi-view fusion, and incomplete structural modeling. Results We propose a novel method termed DTI-RME. The DTI-RME introduces an innovative $$L_2-C$$ L 2 - C loss function that combines the benefits of $$L_2$$ L 2 loss to reduce prediction errors and the robustness of C-loss in handling outliers. This method fuses multiple views through multi-kernel learning that assigns weights to different kernels. DTI-RME uses ensemble learning to assume and learn multiple structures, including the drug-target pair, drug, target, and low-rank structures. Conclusions We evaluated DTI-RME on five real-world DTI datasets and conducted experiments focusing on three key scenarios. In all experiments, DTI-RME demonstrated superior performance compared to existing methods. Furthermore, the case study confirmed DTI-RME’s ability to identify novel drug-target interactions accurately, with 17 of the top 50 predicted interactions being validated.
ISSN:1741-7007