Disease-specific protein complex detection in the human protein interaction network with a supervised learning method

High-throughput experimental techniques have produced a large amount of human protein-protein interactions, making it possible to construct a large-scale human PPI network and detect human protein complexes from the network with computational approaches. However, most of current complex detection methods are based on graph theory which can't utilize the information of the known complexes. In this paper, we present a supervised learning method to detect protein complexes in a human PPI network. In this method, biological characteristics and properties of the network are taken into consideration to construct a rich feature set to train a regression model for protein complex detection. In addition, the specific disease related PPIs are extracted from biomedical literatures and then integrated into the original PPI network for detecting the disease-specific protein complexes more effectively. Experimental results show that the performance of our method is superior to other existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, through the analysis of the breast cancer specific complexes detected with our method, more biological insights for breast cancer (e.g., some candidate susceptible genes of breast cancer) are provided.