MultiNet: A Diffusion-Based Approach to Assign Directionality in Protein Interactions Using a Consensus of Eight Protein Interaction Datasets

Protein–protein interaction network (PPIN) plays a major role in information processing and decision making in cells. The PPIN works as a skeleton for cell signaling and functionality. Understanding the flow of information in a cell can enhance our understanding of functional outcomes and flow of signals. To utilize the whole potential of PPIN, we need to direct the edges of the networks. In recent years, a deluge of PPIN became available for analysis but to understand the full picture, these PPINs need to be oriented, or directed, as the direction of signal or information flow in human PPIN is still mostly unknown. In this paper, we propose MultiNet, a method based on the well-known diffusion-based approach which assigns directionality to PPIN created from eight different networks to cover the most of the human genome MultiNet achieves the highest AUC score of 0.94 over protein DNA interaction test set and performs better than the current state-of-the-art algorithms using networks from single sources.