DrugEL: Ensemble Learning Model for Identification of Druggable Proteins

Druggable proteins are defined as proteins that can interact with drugs to modulate certain biological activity. The identification of druggable proteins holds significant clinical importance, directly impacting the development of targeted therapies for diseases like cancer and metabolic disorders. Identifying druggable proteins involves various methods, including computational prediction models, mass spectrometry (MS), and biochemical assays, but achieving high accuracy remains a challenge. This study proposes DrugEL, an ensemble learning model that uses Bayesian inference to integrate predictions from multiple algorithms: Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), LightGBM (LGBM), and Decision Tree (DT) with seven feature extraction methods (LSA, AAC, PAAC, GAAC, NMBroto, AAIndex, and KNN). The results show that DrugEL outperforms existing models in terms of accuracy (0.9758), MCC (0.9515), AUC (0.9758), sensitivity (0.9742) and specificity (0.9774), particularly excelling with the LSA method.