Protein complex identification through Markov clustering with firefly algorithm on dynamic protein–protein interaction networks

Markov clustering (MCL) is a commonly used algorithm for clustering networks in bioinformatics. It shows good performance in clustering dynamic protein-protein interaction networks (DPINs). However, a limitation of MCL and its variants (e.g, regularized MCL and soft regularized MCL) is that the clustering results are mostly dependent on the parameters whose values are user-specified. In this study, we propose a new MCL method based on the firefly algorithm (FA) to identify protein complexes from DPIN. Based on three-sigma principle, we construct the DPIN and discuss an overall modeling process. In order to optimize parameters, we exploit a number of population-based optimization methods. A thorough comparison completed for different swarm optimization algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and firefly algorithm (FA) has been carried out. The identified protein complexes on the DIP dataset show that the new algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy of protein complex identification.