Predicting disease-gene associations through self-supervised mutual infomax graph convolution network.

Journal: Computers in biology and medicine
PMID:

Abstract

Illuminating associations between diseases and genes can help reveal the pathogenesis of syndromes and contribute to treatments, but a large number of associations remained unexplored. To identify novel disease-gene associations, many computational methods have been developed using disease and gene-related prior knowledge. However, these methods remain of relatively inferior performance due to the limited external data sources and the inevitable noise among the prior knowledge. In this study, we have developed a new method, Self-Supervised Mutual Infomax Graph Convolution Network (MiGCN), to predict disease-gene associations under the guidance of external disease-disease and gene-gene collaborative graphs. The noises within the collaborative graphs were eliminated by maximizing the mutual information between nodes and neighbors through a graphical mutual infomax layer. In parallel, the node interactions were strengthened by a novel informative message passing layer to improve the learning ability of graph neural network. The extensive experiments showed that our model achieved performance improvement over the state-of-art method by more than 8 % on AUC. The datasets, source codes and trained models of MiGCN are available at https://github.com/biomed-AI/MiGCN.

Authors

  • Jiancong Xie
    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510000, China.
  • Jiahua Rao
    School of Data and Computer Science , Sun Yat-sen University , Guangzhou 510006 , China.
  • Junjie Xie
    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510000, China.
  • Huiying Zhao
    Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, 107 Yan Jiang West Road, Guangzhou 510120, China.
  • Yuedong Yang
    Institute for Glycomics and School of Information and Communication Technique, Griffith University, Parklands Dr. Southport, QLD 4222, Australia.