| Proteins physically interact with each other and form protein complexes to perform their biological functions. The prediction of protein complexes from protein-protein interaction (PPI) network is usually difficult when the complexes are overlapping with each other in a dense region of the network. To address the problem of predicting overlapping complexes, the previously proposed network--decomposition approach is promising. It decomposes a PPI network by e.g. removing proteins with high degree (hubs) which may participate in different complexes. This motivates us to examine a list of proteins, which bind their different partners at a different time or at a different location (viz. date hubs), manually collected from literature, for network decomposition. Results show that the CMC complex discovery algorithm after removing date hubs recalls more overlapping complexes that were missed earlier. Further improvement in performance is achieved when we predict date hub proteins based on simple network features and remove them from PPI networks. |
