GCNPCA: miRNA-Disease Associations Prediction Algorithm Based on Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

A growing number of studies have confirmed the important role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in human diseases and the aberrant expression of miRNAs affects the onset and progression of human diseases. The discovery of disease-associated miRNAs as new biomarkers promote the progress of disease pathology and clinical medicine. However, only a small proportion of miRNA-disease correlations have been validated by biological experiments. And identifying miRNA-disease associations through biological experiments is both expensive and inefficient. Therefore, it is important to develop efficient and highly accurate computational methods to predict miRNA-disease associations. A miRNA-disease associations prediction algorithm based on Graph Convolutional neural Networks and Principal Component Analysis (GCNPCA) is proposed in this paper. Specifically, the deep topological structure information is extracted from the heterogeneous network composed of miRNA and disease nodes by a Graph Convolutional neural Network (GCN) with an additional attention mechanism. The internal attribute information of the nodes is obtained by the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Then, the topological structure information and the node attribute information are combined to construct comprehensive feature descriptors. Finally, the Random Forest (RF) is used to train and classify these feature descriptors. In the five-fold cross-validation experiment, the AUC and AUPR for the GCNPCA algorithm are 0.983 and 0.988 respectively.