Evolutionary analysis and interaction prediction for protein-protein interaction network in geometric space

Prediction of protein-protein interaction (PPI) remains a central task in systems biology. With more PPIs identified, forming PPI networks, it has become feasible and also imperative to study PPIs at the network level, such as evolutionary analysis of the networks, for better understanding of PPI networks and for more accurate prediction of pairwise PPIs by leveraging the information gained at the network level. In this work we developed a novel method that enables us to incorporate evolutionary information into geometric space to improve PPI prediction, which in turn can be used to select and evaluate various evolutionary models. The method is tested with cross-validation using human PPI network and yeast PPI network data. The results show that the accuracy of PPI prediction measured by ROC score is increased by up to 14.6%, as compared to a baseline without using evolutionary information. The results also indicate that our modified evolutionary model DANEOsf—combining a gene duplication/neofunctionalization model and scale-free model—has a better fitness and prediction efficacy for these two PPI networks. The improved PPI prediction performance may suggest that our DANEOsf evolutionary model can uncover the underlying evolutionary mechanism for these two PPI networks better than other tested models. Consequently, of particular importance is that our method offers an effective way to select evolutionary models that best capture the underlying evolutionary mechanisms, evaluating the fitness of evolutionary models from the perspective of PPI prediction on real PPI networks.