GCMCDTI: Graph convolutional autoencoder framework for predicting drug–target interactions based on matrix completion

Identification of potential drug-target interactions (DTIs) plays a pivotal role in the development of drug and target discovery in the public healthcare sector. However, biological experiments for predicting interactions between drugs and targets are still expensive, complicated, and time-consuming. Thus, computational methods are widely applied for aiding drug-target interaction prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named GCMCDTI, for DTIs prediction which adopts a graph convolutional network based on matrix completion. We regard the association prediction between drugs and targets as link prediction and treat the process as matrix completion, and then a graph convolutional auto-encoder framework is employed to construct the drug and target embeddings. Then, a bilinear decoder is applied to reconstruct the DTI matrix. We conduct our experiments on four benchmark datasets consisting of enzymes, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), ion channels, and nuclear receptors. The five-fold cross-validation results achieve the high average AUC values of 95.78%, 95.31%, 93.90%, and 91.77%, respectively. To further evaluate our method, we compare our proposed method with other state-of-the-art approaches. The comparison results illustrate that our proposed method obtains improvement in performance on DTI prediction. The proposed method will be a good choice in the field of DTI prediction.