2
that uses drug chemical, biological, and phenotype data to
calculate the feature similarity of drugs using a regularized
least square score minimization.
Some works address the DDI prediction problem as an
edge detection (i.e., link prediction) problem where the edges
to infer represent connections between drugs. The work in
[14] presents both unsupervised and supervised techniques
for link prediction using binary classifiers such as tree, k-
nearest neighbors, support vector machine, random forest,
and gradient boosting machine based on topological and
semantic similarity features to estimate the drug interactions.
Another work [15] proposes two methods based on NNs and
factor propagation over graph nodes, namely, adjacency matrix
factorization (AMF) and adjacency matrix factorization with
propagation (AMFP) for link prediction for discovering DDIs.
The superior performance of deep learning (DL) techniques
across different domains has triggered the interest in such
techniques to estimate drug interactions. The work in [16]
presents a biomedical resource LSTM (BR-LSTM) that com-
bines biomedical resources with lexical information and entity
position information together to extract DDI from the biomed-
ical literature. Note that this model is not DDI prediction
per se, but only an automatic tool for mining of information
from clinical literature. The work in [17] proposes a convo-
lutional mixture density recurrent NN model that integrates
convolutional neural networks, recurrent NNs, and mixture
density networks for DDI prediction. An autoencoder-based
semi-supervised learning algorithm for feature extraction from
FDA adverse event reports to identify potential high priority
DDIs for medication alerts is presented in [18]. Another work
[19] employs autoencoders and a deep feed-forward network
trained on structural similarity profiles (SSP), Gene Ontology
(GO) term similarity profiles (GSP), and target gene similarity
profiles (TSP) of known drug pairs to predict the effects of
DDIs. Due to the black-box nature of the DL models, some
work has been done on seeking for explainable DL-based DDI
techniques. A comprehensive review of the explainable AI-
based techniques to promote the trust of AI models for the
critical task of DDI prediction is presented in [20].
Recently, some works have utilized Matrix Comple-
tion/Factorization (MC/MF) techniques to predict DDIs. Here,
given the partially observed DDI matrix, the task is to compute
the unobserved interactions between the drugs. Some of the
popular generic (not tailored for DDI) MF techniques are (i)
singular value decomposition (SVD) [21], (ii) non-negative
matrix factorization (NMF) [22] and, (iii) probabilistic matrix
factorization (PMF) [23]. We will present the two later ap-
proaches in detail in our next section, as MC/MF constitutes
the core of our contribution.
In addition to the conventional binary DDI prediction,
the work in [24] presents an NMF-based approach utilizing
drug features for comprehensive DDI prediction. Here, the
comprehensive DDI matrix is a signed binary matrix with
+1 for enhancive drugs, −1for degressive drugs, and 0
for no drug interactions, respectively, which is rather useful
to predict the (positive/negative) behaviors of the interacting
drugs. The work in [25] presents an attribute supervised
learning model probabilistic dependent matrix tri-factorization
(PDMTF) approach for adverse DDI prediction. They utilized
two drug attributes, molecular structure, side effects, and
their correlation to compute the adverse interactions among
drugs. The work in [26] introduces a manifold regularized MF
(MRMF) technique to predict DDIs using drug similarities
based on drug features like substructures, targets, enzymes,
transporters, pathways, indications, side effects, and off side
effects.
The publicly available large structured biomedical databases
has enabled the use of knowledge graph (KG) based ap-
proaches for different applications in the biomedical domain.
KGs are used to synthesize large biomedical graphs that map
similar drug-related entities in the drug database. The work
in [27] uses KGs embeddings, namely, RDF2Vec, TransE,
TransD, and machine learning algorithms for DDI prediction.
A KG NN method (KGNN) that captures the drug and its
potential neighborhoods by mining their associated relations
in KG for DDI prediction is proposed in [28]. This method
utilizes the drugs’ topological structures in KG for potential
DDI prediction. Another work [29] utilizes KGs combined
with DL techniques for estimating DDIs. This work considers
the DDI matrix and KG in the form of learned embed-
dings (like ComplEx, TransE, RDF2Vec, etc.) as input to the
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long-Short Term
Memory (LSTM) model to predict DDIs.
In this work, we focus on the MC/MF based framework, as
it presents the advantage of being non supervised and highly
interpretable. Our contribution is to incorporate expert knowl-
edge within this family of approach, so as to take advantage
of the aforementioned progressed in database availability.
III. BACKGROUND
This section presents an overview of MF techniques for
MC. We choose here to remain in a generic setting where the
matrix to complete is real-valued and rectangular. Note that,
for the DDI task, the sought matrix is square symmetric and,
in most cases, binary valued, which might lead to simplified
formulations.
A. Matrix Completion Problem
Let us consider the problem of a full matrix R∈RN×M
to recover from partially known matrix Y∈RN×M. Let
D={i∈ {1, . . . , N}, j ∈ {1, . . . , M}s.t. (i, j)is observed}.
Non observed entries are typically set to zero. The masking of
the indexes outside the set Dis modeled through a Hadamard
product with a matrix B∈ {0,1}N×M, such that Bij = 1
if (i, j)∈ D, and Bij = 0 otherwise. The partially known
matrix Ycan be expressed as:
Y=BR. (1)
The task of matrix completion amounts to recovering the
entries of Rthat do not belong to the set of observed
indexes D.