Background: Drug repositioning (DR) refers to a method used to find new targets for existing drugs. This method can effectively reduce the development cost of drugs, save time on drug development, and reduce the risks of drug design. The traditional experimental methods related to DR are time-consuming, expensive, and have a high failure rate. Several computational methods have been developed with the increase in data volume and computing power. In the last decade, matrix factorization (MF) methods have been widely used in DR issues. However, these methods still have some challenges. (1) The model easily falls into a bad local optimal solution due to the high noise and high missing rate in the data. (2) Single similarity information makes the learning power of the model insufficient in terms of identifying the potential associations accurately.
Objective: We proposed self-paced learning with dual similarity information and MF (SPLDMF), which introduced the self-paced learning method and more information related to drugs and targets into the model to improve prediction performance.
Methods: Combining self-paced learning first can effectively alleviate the model prone to fall into a bad local optimal solution because of the high noise and high data missing rate. Then, we incorporated more data into the model to improve the model's capacity for learning.
Results: Our model achieved the best results on each dataset tested. For example, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and the precision-recall curve of SPLDMF was 0.982 and 0.815, respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.
Conclusion: The experimental results on five benchmark datasets and two extended datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in predicting drug-target interactions.
Keywords: Drug repositioning; drug-target interaction prediction; matrix factorization; multi-view similarity information; self-paced learning.