Abstract
Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction is a crucial component of drug discovery. In recent years, in silico approaches have attracted attention for DTI prediction, primarily because of their potential to mitigate the high costs, low success rates, and extensive timelines of traditional drug development, while efficiently using the growing amount of available data. This review identifies four major factors that influence DTI predictions, highlights persistent challenges, and proposes insights and strategies from the perspectives of data, features, and experimental setups to address these challenges. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of refining established approaches-such as the "guilt-by-association" concept-to manage data sparsity, and integrating emerging technologies, including large language models and AlphaFold, to advance feature engineering. We hope that this work will provide valuable guidance and novel perspectives for advancing future research on DTI predictions.