Using experimental data as a starting point, homology transfer is one way to predict interactomes. Here, PPIs from one organism are used to predict interactions among homologous proteins in another organism ("interologs"). However, this approach has certain limitations, primarily because the source data may not be reliable (e.g. contain false positives and false negatives). In addition, proteins and their interactions change during evolution and thus may have been lost or gained. Nevertheless, numerous interactomes have been predicted, e.g. that of Bacillus licheniformis.
Some algorithms use experimental evidence on structural complexes, the atomic details of binding interfaces and produce detailed atomic models of protein–protein complexes as well as other protein–molecule interactions. Other algorithms use only sequence information, thereby creating unbiased complete networks of interaction with many mistakes.
Some methods use machine learning to distinguish how interacting protein pairs differ from non-interacting protein pairs in terms of pairwise features such as cellular colocalization, gene co-expression, how closely located on a DNA are the genes that encode the two proteins, and so on. Random Forest has been found to be most-effective machine learning method for protein interaction prediction. Such methods have been applied for discovering protein interactions on human interactome, specifically the interactome of Membrane proteins and the interactome of Schizophrenia-associated proteins.