Drug-Drug Interactions Prediction Based on Drug Embedding and Graph Auto-Encoder

Identification of potential Drug-Drug Interactions (DDI) for newly developed drugs is essential in public healthcare. Computational methods of DDI prediction rely on known interactions to learn possible interaction between drug pairs whose interactions are unknown. Past work has used various similarity measures of drugs to predict DDIs. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to DDI Prediction using rich drug representations utilizing multiple knowledge sources. We have used the Drug-Target Interaction (DTI) Network to learn an embedding of drugs by using the metapath2vec algorithm. We have also used drug representation gained from the rich chemical structure representation of drugs using Variational Auto-Encoder. The DDI prediction problem is modeled as a link prediction problem in the DDI network containing known interactions. We represent the nodes in the DDI network as their embeddings. We apply a link prediction algorithm based on Graph Auto-Encoders to predict additional edges in this network, which are potential interactions. We have evaluated our approach on three benchmark DDI datasets, namely DrugBank, SemMedDB, and BioSNAP. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the prior methods in terms of several performance metrics (AUC, AUPR, and F1-score) on all the datasets. Furthermore, we have also evaluated the role of the individual type of drug representation embeddings in boosting up the performance of DDI Prediction.