HierDTI: A Hierarchical Deep Neural Framework for Drug–Target Interaction Prediction

Authors

  • Mudiyala N S Charishma Reddy Department of Computing Technologies, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur Campus, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India Author
  • Bomma Venkata Sai Sowrya Department of Computing Technologies, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur Campus, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India Author
  • Mani Deepak Choudhry Department of Computing Technologies, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur Campus, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India Author

Abstract

This work offers a hierarchical deep learning architecture for the prediction of drug-target protein interactions (DTIs) based on sequence representations of molecular SMILES strings and protein sequences. The new architecture uses multi-level supervision with coarse, intermediate, and final prediction heads. The experiment was conducted under a strict cold-drug split and stratified five-fold experimental validation setup. The model showed an accuracy of 94% and an AUROC of 0.9800 on the cold-drug split. In the five-fold cross-validation setup, the model showed a mean accuracy of 92.96% and a mean AUROC of 0.9774. The results indicate that hierarchical supervision enhances the stability of predictions and generalization performance for trustworthy DTI prediction. Additional improvement in stability-centered architectures may further boost real-world applications in computational drug discovery.

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Published

2026-09-21