That's very helpful. Using binding energy sounds appealing. Would you recommend something like this paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3375440/ )? From the abstract: "We present an energy function for predicting binding free energies of protein–protein complexes, using the three-dimensional structures of the complex and unbound proteins as input."
Also, complexes are identified by co-fractionation (co-elution, protein correlation profiling). I edited the question to reflect this.