Protein complex detection based on partially shared multi-view clustering

BACKGROUND: Protein complexes are the key molecular entities to perform many essential biological functions. In recent years, high-throughput experimental techniques have generated a large amount of protein interaction data. As a consequence, computational analysis of such data for protein complex detection has received increased attention in the literature. However, most existing works focus on predicting protein complexes from a single type of data, either physical interaction data or co-complex interaction data. These two types of data provide compatible and complementary information, so it is necessary to integrate them to discover the underlying structures and obtain better performance in complex detection. RESULTS: In this study, we propose a novel multi-view clustering algorithm, called the Partially Shared Multi-View Clustering model (PSMVC), to carry out such an integrated analysis. Unlike traditional multi-view learning algorithms that focus on mining either consistent or complementary information embedded in the multi-view data, PSMVC can jointly explore the shared and specific information inherent in different views. In our experiments, we compare the complexes detected by PSMVC from single data source with those detected from multiple data sources. We observe that jointly analyzing multi-view data benefits the detection of protein complexes. Furthermore, extensive experiment results demonstrate that PSMVC performs much better than 16 state-of-the-art complex detection techniques, including ensemble clustering and data integration techniques. CONCLUSIONS: In this work, we demonstrate that when integrating multiple data sources, using partially shared multi-view clustering model can help to identify protein complexes which are not readily identifiable by conventional single-view-based methods and other integrative analysis methods. All the results and source codes are available on https://github.com/Oyl-CityU/PSMVC. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-016-1164-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.