A Novel Drug Repositioning Approach Based on Collaborative Metric Learning

Computational drug repositioning, which is an efficient approach to find potential indications for drugs, has been used to increase the efficiency of drug development. The drug repositioning problem essentially is a top-K recommendation task that recommends most likely diseases to drugs based on drug and disease related information. Therefore, many recommendation methods can be adopted to drug repositioning. Collaborative metric learning (CML) algorithm can produce distance metrics that capture the important relationships among objects, and has been widely used in recommendation domains. By applying CML in drug repositioning, a joint metric space is learned to encode drug's relationships with different diseases. In this study, we propose a novel drug repositioning computational method using Collaborative Metric Learning to predict novel drug-disease associations based on known drug and disease related information. Specifically, the proposed method learns latent vectors of drugs and diseases by applying metric learning, and then predicts the association probability of one drug-disease pair based on the learned vectors. The comprehensive experimental results show that CMLDR outperforms the other state-of-the-art drug repositioning algorithms in terms of precision, recall, and AUPR.