Review on predicting pairwise relationships between human microbes, drugs and diseases: from biological data to computational models

Abstract

In recent years, with the rapid development of techniques in bioinformatics and life science, a considerable quantity of biomedical data has been accumulated, based on which researchers have developed various computational approaches to discover potential associations between human microbes, drugs and diseases. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in prediction of potential correlations between microbes, drugs and diseases from biological data to computational models. Firstly, we introduced the widely used datasets relevant to the identification of potential relationships between microbes, drugs and diseases in detail. And then, we divided a series of a lot of representative computing models into five major categories including network, matrix factorization, matrix completion, regularization and artificial neural network for in-depth discussion and comparison. Finally, we analysed possible challenges and opportunities in this research area, and at the same time we outlined some suggestions for further improvement of predictive performances as well.

Keywords: computational models; drug–disease relationships; microbe–disease associations; microbe–drug interactions; predictive methods.