A Computational-Based Method for Predicting Drug–Target Interactions by Using Stacked Autoencoder Deep Neural Network

Identifying the interaction between drugs and target proteins is an important area of drug research, which provides a broad prospect for low-risk and faster drug development. However, due to the limitations of traditional experiments when revealing drug-protein interactions (DTIs), the screening of targets not only takes a lot of time and money but also has high false-positive and false-negative rates. Therefore, it is imperative to develop effective automatic computational methods to accurately predict DTIs in the postgenome era. In this article, we propose a new computational method for predicting DTIs from drug molecular structure and protein sequence by using the stacked autoencoder of deep learning, which can adequately extract the raw data information. The proposed method has the advantage that it can automatically mine the hidden information from protein sequences and generate highly representative features through iterations of multiple layers. The feature descriptors are then constructed by combining the molecular substructure fingerprint information, and fed into the rotation forest for accurate prediction. The experimental results of fivefold cross-validation indicate that the proposed method achieves superior performance on gold standard data sets (enzymes, ion channels, GPCRs G-protein-coupled receptors, and nuclear receptors) with accuracy of 0.9414, 0.9116, 0.8669, and 0.8056, respectively. We further comprehensively explore the performance of the proposed method by comparing it with other feature extraction algorithms, state-of-the-art classifiers, and other excellent methods on the same data set. The excellent comparison results demonstrate that the proposed method is highly competitive when predicting drug-target interactions.