Predicting miRNA-disease associations via layer attention graph convolutional network model

Background: MiRNA is a class of non-coding single-stranded RNA molecules with a length of approximately 22 nucleotides encoded by endogenous genes, which can regulate the expression of other genes. Therefore, it is very important to predict the associations between miRNA and disease. Predecessors developed a new prediction method of drug-disease association, and it achieved good results. Methods: In this paper, we introduced the method of LAGCN to identify potential miRNA-disease associations. First, we integrate three associations into a heterogeneous network, such as the known miRNA-disease association, miRNA-miRNA similarities and disease-disease similarities, next we apply graph convolution network to learn the embedding of miRNA and disease. We use an attention mechanism to combine embedding from multiple convolution layers. Unobserved miRNA-disease associations are scored based on integrated embedding. Results: After fivefold cross-validations, the value of AUC is reached 0.9091, which is higher than other prediction methods and baseline methods. Conclusions: In this paper, we introduced the method of LAGCN to identify potential miRNA-disease associations. LAGCN has achieved good performance in predicting miRNA-disease associations, and it is superior to other association prediction methods and baseline methods.