MSGCA: Drug-Disease Associations Prediction Based on Multi-Similarities Graph Convolutional Autoencoder

Identifying drug-disease associations (DDAs) is critical to the development of drugs. Traditional methods to determine DDAs are expensive and inefficient. Therefore, it is imperative to develop more accurate and effective methods for DDAs prediction. Most current DDAs prediction methods utilize original DDAs matrix directly. However, the original DDAs matrix is sparse, which greatly affects the prediction consequences. Hence, a prediction method based on multi-similarities graph convolutional autoencoder (MSGCA) is proposed for DDAs prediction. First, MSGCA integrates multiple drug similarities and disease similarities using centered kernel alignment-based multiple kernel learning (CKA-MKL) algorithm to form new drug similarity and disease similarity, respectively. Second, the new drug and disease similarities are improved by linear neighborhood, and the DDAs matrix is reconstructed by weighted K nearest neighbor profiles. Next, the reconstructed DDAs and the improved drug and disease similarities are integrated into a heterogeneous network. Finally, the graph convolutional autoencoder with attention mechanism is utilized to predict DDAs. Compared with extant methods, MSGCA shows superior results on three datasets. Furthermore, case studies further demonstrate the reliability of MSGCA.