Addressing Model Overcomplexity in Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction With Molecular Fingerprints
This work addresses computational efficiency and generalization issues in pharmaceutical research, though it is incremental as it benchmarks existing representations rather than introducing new methods.
The study tackled the problem of model overcomplexity in drug-drug interaction prediction by investigating simpler molecular representations like Morgan fingerprints and graph-based embeddings, achieving competitive performance on DrugBank and FDA datasets while identifying relevant molecular motifs.
Accurately predicting drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is crucial for pharmaceutical research and clinical safety. Recent deep learning models often suffer from high computational costs and limited generalization across datasets. In this study, we investigate a simpler yet effective approach using molecular representations such as Morgan fingerprints (MFPS), graph-based embeddings from graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and transformer-derived embeddings from MoLFormer integrated into a straightforward neural network. We benchmark our implementation on DrugBank DDI splits and a drug-drug affinity (DDA) dataset from the Food and Drug Administration. MFPS along with MoLFormer and GCN representations achieve competitive performance across tasks, even in the more challenging leak-proof split, highlighting the sufficiency of simple molecular representations. Moreover, we are able to identify key molecular motifs and structural patterns relevant to drug interactions via gradient-based analyses using the representations under study. Despite these results, dataset limitations such as insufficient chemical diversity, limited dataset size, and inconsistent labeling impact robust evaluation and challenge the need for more complex approaches. Our work provides a meaningful baseline and emphasizes the need for better dataset curation and progressive complexity scaling.