IntScore: a web tool for confidence scoring of biological interactions

Knowledge of all molecular interactions that potentially take place in the cell is a key for a detailed understanding of cellular processes. Currently available interaction data, such as protein–protein interaction maps, are known to contain false positives that inevitably diminish the accuracy of network-based inferences. Interaction confidence scoring is thus a crucial intermediate step after obtaining interaction data and before using it in an interaction network-based inference approach. It enables to weight individual interactions according to the likelihood that they actually take place in the cell, and can be used to filter out false positives. We describe a web tool called IntScore which calculates confidence scores for user-specified sets of interactions. IntScore provides six network topology- and annotation-based confidence scoring methods. It also enables the integration of scores calculated by the different methods into an aggregate score using machine learning approaches. IntScore is user-friendly and extensively documented. It is freely available at http://intscore.molgen.mpg.de.