Predicting microRNA-Disease Associations through Multi-View Feature Fusion and Matrix Completion on Graph Convolutional Networks

Since the regulatory roles of microRNAs in complex human diseases have been gradually demonstrated, more and more enlightening models were developed for predicting microRNA-disease associations. These models can inform biological studies on the differential expression of microRNAs. In this paper, a graph convolutional network-based model using multi-view feature fusion and matrix completion, FMCGCN for brevity, is proposed. First of all, graph autoencoders are used to learn multiple embeddings from different networks. For convenience, attention mechanisms are used to fuse them. As a result, multi-view features constructed from different perspectives are aggregated. Then, the fused embedding is fed into the graph convolutional network to aggregate local information. This fused embedding is thought to facilitate feature extraction for graph convolutional networks. Finally, feature and nuclear norm minimization, a method for matrix completion, is used to obtain the prediction matrix. Additionally, evaluation results under 5-fold cross-validation prove that FMCGCN outperforms current models in several metrics. Furthermore, case studies for esophageal neoplasms and pancreatic neoplasms also demonstrate the validity of our model.