Application of learning to rank in bioinformatics tasks

ITNR: Inversion Transformer-based Neural Ranking for cancer drug recommendations

Personalized drug response prediction is an approach for tailoring effective therapeutic strategies for patients based on their tumors' genomic characterization. While machine learning methods are widely employed in the literature, they often struggle to capture drug-cell line relations across various cell lines. In addressing this challenge, our study introduces a novel listwise Learning-to-Rank (LTR) model named Inversion Transformer-based Neural Ranking (ITNR). ITNR utilizes genomic features and a transformer architecture to decipher functional relationships and construct models that can predict patient-specific drug responses. Our experiments were conducted on three major drug response data sets, showing that ITNR reliably and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LTR models.

iSnoDi-MDRF: Identifying snoRNA-Disease Associations Based on Multiple Biological Data by Ranking Framework

Accumulating evidence indicates that the dysregulation of small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) is relevant with diseases. Identifying snoRNA-disease associations by computational methods is desired for biologists, which can save considerable costs and time compared biological experiments. However, it still faces some challenges as followings: (i) Many snoRNAs are detected in recent years, but only a few snoRNAs have been proved to be associated with diseases; (ii) Computational predictors trained with only a few known snoRNA-disease associations fail to accurately identify the snoRNA-disease associations. In this study, we propose a ranking framework, called iSnoDi-MDRF, to identify potential snoRNA-disease associations based on multiple biological data, which has the following highlights: (i) iSnoDi-MDRF integrates ranking framework, which is not only able to identify potential associations between known snoRNAs and diseases, but also can identify diseases associated with new snoRNAs. (ii) Known gene-disease associations are employed to help train a mature model for predicting snoRNA-disease association. Experimental results illustrate that iSnoDi-MDRF is very suitable for identifying potential snoRNA-disease associations. The web server of iSnoDi-MDRF predictor is freely available at http://bliulab.net/iSnoDi-MDRF/.

LncRNA-disease association identification using graph auto-encoder and learning to rank

Discovering the relationships between long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and diseases is significant in the treatment, diagnosis and prevention of diseases. However, current identified lncRNA-disease associations are not enough because of the expensive and heavy workload of wet laboratory experiments. Therefore, it is greatly important to develop an efficient computational method for predicting potential lncRNA-disease associations. Previous methods showed that combining the prediction results of the lncRNA-disease associations predicted by different classification methods via Learning to Rank (LTR) algorithm can be effective for predicting potential lncRNA-disease associations. However, when the classification results are incorrect, the ranking results will inevitably be affected. We propose the GraLTR-LDA predictor based on biological knowledge graphs and ranking framework for predicting potential lncRNA-disease associations. Firstly, homogeneous graph and heterogeneous graph are constructed by integrating multi-source biological information. Then, GraLTR-LDA integrates graph auto-encoder and attention mechanism to extract embedded features from the constructed graphs. Finally, GraLTR-LDA incorporates the embedded features into the LTR via feature crossing statistical strategies to predict priority order of diseases associated with query lncRNAs. Experimental results demonstrate that GraLTR-LDA outperforms the other state-of-the-art predictors and can effectively detect potential lncRNA-disease associations. Availability and implementation: Datasets and source codes are available at http://bliulab.net/GraLTR-LDA.

Structured Sparse Regularized TSK Fuzzy System for predicting therapeutic peptides

Therapeutic peptides act on the skeletal system, digestive system and blood system, have antibacterial properties and help relieve inflammation. In order to reduce the resource consumption of wet experiments for the identification of therapeutic peptides, many computational-based methods have been developed to solve the identification of therapeutic peptides. Due to the insufficiency of traditional machine learning methods in dealing with feature noise. We propose a novel therapeutic peptide identification method called Structured Sparse Regularized Takagi-Sugeno-Kang Fuzzy System on Within-Class Scatter (SSR-TSK-FS-WCS). Our method achieves good performance on multiple therapeutic peptides and UCI datasets.

Current status and future prospects of drug-target interaction prediction

Drug-target interaction prediction is important for drug development and drug repurposing. Many computational methods have been proposed for drug-target interaction prediction due to their potential to the time and cost reduction. In this review, we introduce the molecular docking and machine learning-based methods, which have been widely applied to drug-target interaction prediction. Particularly, machine learning-based methods are divided into different types according to the data processing form and task type. For each type of method, we provide a specific description and propose some solutions to improve its capability. The knowledge of heterogeneous network and learning to rank are also summarized in this review. As far as we know, this is the first comprehensive review that summarizes the knowledge of heterogeneous network and learning to rank in the drug-target interaction prediction. Moreover, we propose three aspects that can be explored in depth for future research.

Application of Machine Learning for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

Exploring drug–target interactions by biomedical experiments requires a lot of human, financial, and material resources. To save time and cost to meet the needs of the present generation, machine learning methods have been introduced into the prediction of drug–target interactions. The large amount of available drug and target data in existing databases, the evolving and innovative computer technologies, and the inherent characteristics of various types of machine learning have made machine learning techniques the mainstream method for drug–target interaction prediction research. In this review, details of the specific applications of machine learning in drug–target interaction prediction are summarized, the characteristics of each algorithm are analyzed, and the issues that need to be further addressed and explored for future research are discussed. The aim of this review is to provide a sound basis for the construction of high-performance models.