Extraction of knowledge on protein-protein interaction by association rule discovery

Motivation: Protein-protein interactions are systematically examined using the yeast two-hybrid method. Consequently, a lot of protein-protein interaction data are currently being accumulated. Nevertheless, general information or knowledge on protein-protein interactions is poorly extracted from these data. Thus we have been trying to extract the knowledge from the protein-protein interaction data using data mining. Results: A data mining method is proposed to discover association rules related to protein-protein interactions. To evaluate the detected rules by the method, a new scoring measure of the rules is introduced. The method allowed us to detect popular interaction rules such as 'An SH3 domain binds to a proline-rich region.' These results indicate that the method may detect novel knowledge on protein-protein interactions.