Deep Learning Approaches for Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction: A Comparative Analysis of Graph Neural Networks and Transformer Architectures
Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental to understanding cellular processes and disease mechanisms. This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of deep learning approaches for PPI prediction, specifically examining Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformer-based architectures. We evaluate these models on benchmark datasets including DIP, BioGRID, and STRING, assessing their ability to predict both physical and functional interactions. Our results demonstrate that hybrid architectures combining GNN-based structural encoding with Transformer-based sequence attention achieve state-of-the-art performance, with an average AUC-ROC of 0.942 and AUC-PR of 0.891 across all benchmark datasets. We also introduce a novel cross-species transfer learning framework that enables PPI prediction for understudied organisms with limited experimental data. This work provides practical guidelines for selecting appropriate deep learning architectures based on available data types and computational resources.