A Comprehensive Review of Computational Methods For Drug-Drug Interaction Detection

The detection of drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is a crucial task for drug safety surveillance, which provides effective and safe co-prescriptions of multiple drugs. Since laboratory researches are often complicated, costly and time-consuming, it's urgent to develop computational approaches to detect drug-drug interactions. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art computational methods falling into three categories: literature-based extraction methods, machine learning-based prediction methods and pharmacovigilance-based data mining methods. Literature-based extraction methods detect DDIs from published literature using natural language processing techniques; machine learning-based prediction methods build prediction models based on the known DDIs in databases and predict novel ones; pharmacovigilance-based data mining methods usually apply statistical techniques on various electronic data to detect drug-drug interaction signals. We first present the taxonomy of drug-drug interaction detection methods and provide the outlines of three categories of methods. Afterwards, we respectively introduce research backgrounds and data sources of three categories, and illustrate their representative approaches as well as evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the current challenges of existing methods and highlight potential opportunities for future directions.