Identifying Protein Complexes by Combining Network Topology and Biological Characteristics
Protein–protein interaction (PPI) data derived from biological experiments include many false-positive interactions which are treated equally as other real physical interactions, thereby complicating the detection of real protein complexes from protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks. In this paper, a new weighting method, named as cwMINE (combined weight of module identification in networks), for detecting protein complexes efficiently in protein interaction networks is presented. cwMINE has a good combination between network topology and biological feature, which can solve false positives efficiently of PPI networks and make discovered protein complexes higher quality. In addition, a new expanding rule during the detection process, namely, expanding coefficient, is developed to filter edges with lower weights. The proposed method is compared with several state- of-the-art algorithms in three yeast PPI networks with two benchmark data sets. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the other algorithms in most datasets in terms of the evaluation metrics. We further validate the effectiveness of our method on a human PPI network constructed from the HPRD dataset to identify important disease-related functional modules and provided valuable indications for disease treatment.