A Novel Computational Model for Predicting microRNA-Disease Associations Based on Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks

Identifying the interactions between disease and microRNA (miRNA) can accelerate drugs development, individualized diagnosis, and treatment for various human diseases. However, experimental methods are time-consuming and costly. So computational approaches to predict latent miRNA-disease interactions are eliciting increased attention. But most previous studies have mainly focused on designing complicated similarity-based methods to predict latent interactions between miRNAs and diseases. In this study, we propose a novel computational model, termed heterogeneous graph convolutional network for miRNA-disease associations (HGCNMDA), which is based on known human protein-protein interaction (PPI) and integrates four biological networks: miRNA-disease, miRNA-gene, disease-gene, and PPI network. HGCNMDA achieved reliable performance using leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV). HGCNMDA is then compared to three state-of-the-art algorithms based on five-fold cross-validation. HGCNMDA achieves an AUC of 0.9626 and an average precision of 0.9660, respectively, which is ahead of other competitive algorithms. We further analyze the top-10 unknown interactions between miRNA and disease. In summary, HGCNMDA is a useful computational model for predicting miRNA-disease interactions.