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Identifying targets of herbs is a primary step for investigating pharmacological mechanisms of herbal drugs in Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Experimental targets identification of herbs is a difficult and time-consuming work. Computational method for identifying herb targets is an efficient approach. However, how to make full use of heterogeneous network data about herbs and targets to improve the performance of herb targets prediction is still a dilemma.

In our study, a random walk algorithm on the heterogeneous herb-target network (named heNetRW) has been proposed to identify protein targets of herbs. By building a heterogeneous herb-target network involving herbs, targets and their interactions and simulating random walk algorithm on the network, the candidate targets of the given herb can be predicted …