Kernel Bayesian nonlinear matrix factorization based on variational inference for human-virus protein-protein interaction prediction.

Identification of potential human-virus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms of viral infection and to the development of antiviral drugs. Existing computational models often have more hyperparameters that need to be adjusted manually, which limits their computational efficiency and generalization ability. Based on this, this study proposes a kernel Bayesian logistic matrix decomposition model with automatic rank determination, VKBNMF, for the prediction of human-virus PPIs. VKBNMF introduces auxiliary information into the logistic matrix decomposition and sets the prior probabilities of the latent variables to build a Bayesian framework for automatic parameter search. In addition, we construct the variational inference framework of VKBNMF to ensure the solution efficiency. The experimental results show that for the scenarios of paired PPIs, VKBNMF achieves an average AUPR of 0.9101, 0.9316, 0.8727, and 0.9517 on the four benchmark datasets, respectively, and for the scenarios of new human (viral) proteins, VKBNMF still achieves a higher hit rate. The case study also further demonstrated that VKBNMF can be used as an effective tool for the prediction of human-virus PPIs.