LinkDTI: Drug-Target Interactionsprediction through a Link Predictionframework on Biomedical KnowledgeGraph

Computational drug-target interactions (DTI) prediction serves as a valuable tool for drug discovery and repurposing by cost-effectively narrowing down the potential drug-target space. This paper presents LinkDTI, a computational framework that predicts DTIs by identifying connections within a heterogeneous knowledge graph of drugs, proteins, diseases, and side effects. Unlike methods that rely on mathematical techniques like matrix completion or similarity-based scoring, LinkDTI uses an advanced graph-based approach to capture relationships between biomedical entities. Specifically, LinkDTI applies a modified version of the multilayer GraphSAGE model that learns from the heterogeneous knowledge graph and predicts potential drug-target interactions. Our model incorporates negative sampling that balances the data to address the issue of having more negative than positive interactions. Our results show that LinkDTI consistently performs better in AUROC and AUPRC than baseline methods by at least 2.5% across different sampling ratios and conditions. Subsequently, it identifies approximately 945 new potential DTIs, marking a 49.14% increase over known DTIs. Overall, LinkDTI offers a simple yet effective method for integrating diverse biomedical data to identify potential drug-target interactions. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/hub2nature/LinkDTI_heterogenous_KG.git.