Identifying Protein Complexes From Protein-Protein Interaction Networks Based on Fuzzy Clustering and GO Semantic Information

Protein complexes are of great significance to provide valuable insights into the mechanisms of biological processes of proteins. A variety of computational algorithms have thus been proposed to identify protein complexes in a protein-protein interaction network. However, few of them can perform their tasks by taking into account both network topology and protein attribute information in a unified fuzzy-based clustering framework. Since proteins in the same complex are similar in terms of their attribute information and the consideration of fuzzy clustering can also make it possible for us to identify overlapping complexes, we target to propose such a novel fuzzy-based clustering framework, namely FCAN-PCI, for an improved identification accuracy. To do so, the semantic similarity between the attribute information of proteins is calculated and we then integrate it into a well-established fuzzy clustering model together with the network topology. After that, a momentum method is adopted to accelerate the clustering procedure. FCAN-PCI finally applies a heuristical search strategy to identify overlapping protein complexes. A series of extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of FCAN-PCI by comparing it with state-of-the-art identification algorithms and the results demonstrate the promising performance of FCAN-PCI.