Papers › TransformerCPI: improving compound–protein interaction prediction by sequence-based...

TransformerCPI: improving compound–protein interaction prediction by sequence-based deep learning with self-attention mechanism and label reversal experiments

19 May 2020Bioinformatics 2020 5archive 2025-07-28

Lifan Chen, Xiaoqin Tan, Dingyan Wang, Feisheng Zhong, Xiaohong Liu, Tianbiao Yang, Xiaomin Luo, Kaixian Chen, Hualiang Jiang, Mingyue Zheng

Motivation Identifying compound–protein interaction (CPI) is a crucial task in drug discovery and chemogenomics studies, and proteins without three-dimensional structure account for a large part of potential biological targets, which requires developing methods using only protein sequence information to predict CPI. However, sequence-based CPI models may face some specific pitfalls, including using inappropriate datasets, hidden ligand bias and splitting datasets inappropriately, resulting in overestimation of their prediction performance. Results To address these issues, we here constructed new datasets specific for CPI prediction, proposed a novel transformer neural network named TransformerCPI, and introduced a more rigorous label reversal experiment to test whether a model learns true interaction features. TransformerCPI achieved much improved performance on the new experiments, and it can be deconvolved to highlight important interacting regions of protein sequences and compound atoms, which may contribute chemical biology studies with useful guidance for further ligand structural optimization.

PaperPDFCode

Code

lifanchen-simm/transformerCPI mentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Drug Discovery

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Drug Discovery BindingDB TransformerCPI AUC 0.937 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Drug Discovery LIT-PCBA(ALDH1) TransformerCPI AUC 0.694 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Drug Discovery LIT-PCBA(ESR1_ant) TransformerCPI AUC 0.616 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Drug Discovery LIT-PCBA(KAT2A) TransformerCPI AUC 0.650 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Drug Discovery LIT-PCBA(MAPK1) TransformerCPI AUC 0.683 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections