Discovering Links Between Side Effects and Drugs Using a Diffusion Based Method

Identifying the unintended effects of drugs (side effects) is a very important issue in pharmacological studies. The laboratory verification of associations between drugs and side effects requires costly, time-intensive research. Thus, an approach to predicting drug side effects based on known side effects, using a computational model, is highly desirable. To provide such a model, we used openly available data resources to model drugs and side effects as a bipartite graph. The drug-drug network is constructed using the word2vec model where the edges between drugs represent the semantic similarity between them. We integrated the bipartite graph and the semantic similarity graph using a matrix factorization method and a diffusion based model. Our results show the effectiveness of this integration by computing weighted (i.e., ranked) predictions of initially unknown links between side effects and drugs.