A model for predicting ncRNA-protein interactions based on graph neural networks and community detection.

Journal: Methods (San Diego, Calif.)
Published Date:

Abstract

Non-coding RNA (ncRNA) s play an considerable role in the current biological sciences, such as gene transcription, gene expression, etc. Exploring the ncRNA-protein interactions(NPI) is of great significance, while some experimental techniques are very expensive in terms of time consumption and labor cost. This has promoted the birth of some computational algorithms related to traditional statistics and artificial intelligence. However, these algorithms usually require the sequence or structural feature vector of the molecule. Although graph neural network (GNN) s has been widely used in recent academic and industrial researches, its potential remains unexplored in the field of detecting NPI. Hence, we present a novel GNN-based model to detect NPI in this paper, where the detecting problem of NPI is transformed into the graph link prediction problem. Specifically, the proposed method utilizes two groups of labels to distinguish two different types of nodes: ncRNA and protein, which alleviates the problem of over-coupling in graph network. Subsequently, ncRNA and protein embedding is initially optimized based on the cluster ownership relationship of nodes in the graph. Moreover, the model applies a self-attention mechanism to preserve the graph topology to reduce information loss during pooling. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model indeed has superior performance.

Authors

  • Linlin Zhuo
    School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wenzhou University of Technology, Wenzhou, Zhejiang 325035, China; College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China.
  • Yifan Chen
    Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom.
  • Bosheng Song
  • Yuansheng Liu
  • Yansen Su
    Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, 230601, Hefei, China.