Identification of human protein complexes from local sub-graphs of protein–protein interaction network based on random forest with topological structure features

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In the post-genomic era, one of the most important and challenging tasks is to identify protein complexes and further elucidate its molecular mechanisms in specific biological processes. Previous computational approaches usually identify protein complexes from protein interaction network based on dense sub-graphs and incomplete priori information. Additionally, the computational approaches have little concern about the biological properties of proteins and there is no a common evaluation metric to evaluate the performance. So, it is necessary to construct novel method for identifying protein complexes and elucidating the function of protein complexes. In this study, a novel approach is proposed to identify protein complexes using random forest and topological structure. Each protein complex is represented by a graph of interactions, where descriptor of the protein primary structure is used to characterize biological properties of protein and vertex is weighted by the descriptor. The topological structure features are developed and used to characterize protein complexes. Random forest algorithm is utilized to build prediction model and identify protein complexes from local sub-graphs instead of dense sub-graphs. As a demonstration, the proposed approach is applied to protein interaction data in human, and the satisfied results are obtained with accuracy of 80.24%, sensitivity of 81.94%, specificity of 80.07%, and Matthew's correlation coefficient of 0.4087 in 10-fold cross-validation test. Some new protein complexes are identified, and analysis based on Gene Ontology shows that the complexes are likely to be true complexes and play important roles in the pathogenesis of some diseases. PCI-RFTS, a corresponding executable program for protein complexes identification, can be acquired freely on request from the authors.