Predict multi-type drug–drug interactions in cold start scenario

Abstract Background Prediction of drug–drug interactions (DDIs) can reveal potential adverse pharmacological reactions between drugs in co-medication. Various methods have been proposed to address this issue. Most of them focus on the traditional link prediction between drugs, however, they ignore the cold-start scenario, which requires the prediction between known drugs having approved DDIs and new drugs having no DDI. Moreover, they're restricted to infer whether DDIs occur, but are not able to deduce diverse DDI types, which are important in clinics. Results In this paper, we propose a cold start prediction model for both single-type and multiple-type drug–drug interactions, referred to as CSMDDI. CSMDDI predict not only whether two drugs trigger pharmacological reactions but also what reaction types they induce in the cold start scenario. We implement several embedding methods in CSMDDI, including SVD, GAE, TransE, RESCAL and compare it with the state-of-the-art multi-type DDI prediction method DeepDDI and DDIMDL to verify the performance. The comparison shows that CSMDDI achieves a good performance of DDI prediction in the case of both the occurrence prediction and the multi-type reaction prediction in cold start scenario. Conclusions Our approach is able to predict not only conventional binary DDIs but also what reaction types they induce in the cold start scenario. More importantly, it learns a mapping function who can bridge the drugs attributes to their network embeddings to predict DDIs. The main contribution of CSMDDI contains the development of a generalized framework to predict the single-type and multi-type of DDIs in the cold start scenario, as well as the implementations of several embedding models for both single-type and multi-type of DDIs. The dataset and source code can be accessed at https://github.com/itsosy/csmddi .