Semi-supervised multi-task learning for predicting interactions between HIV-1 and human proteins

Motivation: Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are critical for virtually every biological function. Recently, researchers suggested to use supervised learning for the task of classifying pairs of proteins as interacting or not. However, its performance is largely restricted by the availability of truly interacting proteins (labeled). Meanwhile, there exists a considerable amount of protein pairs where an association appears between two partners, but not enough experimental evidence to support it as a direct interaction (partially labeled)