PNESR-DDI: An Effective Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction Model Based on Pretraining Method and Enhanced Subgraph Reconstruction

Drug-Drug Interaction (DDI) task plays a crucial role in clinical treatment and drug development. Recently, deep learning methods have been successfully applied for DDI prediction. However, training deep learning models always need large amount of data, while known DDIs are scarce. To address this challenge, a graph neural network-based DDI prediction model named PNESR-DDI is proposed, which compensates for the lack of DDIs by enriching drug representations. First, to obtain initial node representations that incorporate rich semantic information from the biomedical knowledge graph (KG), a link prediction pre-training method on external KG is proposed in the node embedding pre-training module. Then, considering the large scale of the KG, subgraph extraction for the target drug pairs is introduced to reduce noise and decrease computational complexity in the subgraph anchoring module. After that, the subgraph is updated, and node similarities are propagated in the subgraph reconstruction module. Based on the node similarity scores, the subgraph is pruned and reconstructed, which adjusts node representations to be more conducive to DDI prediction. Finally, the drug embeddings, subgraph representations, and drug fingerprint features are concatenated to predict DDIs. PNESRDDI is evaluated on two benchmark DDI datasets: DrugBank and TWOSIDES. Experiment results show that PNESR-DDI achieves better performance than baselines. Ablation results validate the effectiveness of the pre-training method and the adaptive subgraph reconstruction strategy.