Prediction of Protein-Protein Interaction based on Interaction-Specific Learning and Hierarchical Information

Background: Prediction of protein–protein interactions (PPIs) is fundamental for identifying drug targets and understanding cellular processes. The rapid growth of PPI studies necessitates the development of efficient and accurate tools for automated prediction of PPIs. In recent years, several robust deep learning models have been developed for PPI prediction and have found widespread application in proteomics research. Despite these advancements, current computational tools still face limitations in modeling both the pairwise interactions and the hierarchical relationships between proteins. Results: We present HI-PPI, a novel deep learning method that integrates hierarchical representation of PPI network and interaction-specific learning for protein-protein interaction prediction. HI-PPI extracts the hierarchical information by embedding structural and relational information into hyperbolic space. A gated interaction network is then employed to extract pairwise features for interaction prediction. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that HI-PPI outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, HI-PPI improves MicroF1 scores by 2.62%–7.09% over the second-best method. Moreover, HI-PPI offers explicit interpretability of the hierarchical organization within the PPI network. The distance between the origin and the hyperbolic embedding computed by HI-PPI naturally reflects the hierarchical level of proteins. Conclusions: Overall, the proposed HI-PPI effectively addresses the limitations of existing PPI prediction methods. By leveraging the hierarchical structure of PPI network, HI-PPI significantly enhances the accuracy and robustness of PPI predictions.