Simplified Swarm Optimization-Based Function Module Detection in Protein–Protein Interaction Networks

Proteomics research has become one of the most important topics in the field of life science and natural science. At present, research on protein–protein interaction networks (PPIN) mainly focuses on detecting protein complexes or function modules. However, existing approaches are either ineffective or incomplete. In this paper, we investigate detection mechanisms of functional modules in PPIN, including open database, existing detection algorithms, and recent solutions. After that, we describe the proposed approach based on the simplified swarm optimization (SSO) algorithm and the knowledge of Gene Ontology (GO). The proposed solution implements the SSO algorithm for clustering proteins with similar function, and imports biological gene ontology knowledge for further identifying function complexes and improving detection accuracy. Furthermore, we use four different categories of species datasets for experiment: fruitfly, mouse, scere, and human. The testing and analysis result show that the proposed solution is feasible, efficient, and could achieve a higher accuracy of prediction than existing approaches