SIPMA: A Systematic Identification of Protein-Protein Interactions in Zea mays Using Autocorrelation Features in a Machine-Learning Framework

Zea mays (maize) is one of the most vital crops which are grown widely in the world. To understand the molecular structures and functions of maize, the identification of protein-protein interaction (PPI) is very important. PPI identification by wet lab experiments is time-consuming, expensive and laborious. These days in silico methods that accurately predict potential PPIs based on protein sequence information are highly demanded. Research on PPI prediction in maize is currently very limited, and no dedicated bioinformatics schemes are available. In this work, we proposed a novel approach, termed SIPMA (Systematic Identification of PPI in Maize using Autocorrelation). A machine learning random forest classifier was trained with autocorrelation features to build the prediction model. The SIPMA, which was tested by the experimentally verified PPI dataset of maize, yielded a prediction accuracy of 0.899 when the specificity was 0.969 on the training set. The SIPMA achieved promising performances on the test datasets. Compared with different sequence-based encoding and statistical learning methods, the SIPMA was a powerful computational resource for identifying PPIs in maize.