Inferring Metabolite-Disease Association Using Graph Convolutional Networks

As is well known, biological experiments are time-consuming and laborious, so there is absolutely no doubt that developing an effective computational model will help solve these problems. Most of computational models rely on the biological similarity and network-based methods that cannot consider the topological structures of metabolite-disease association graphs. We proposed a novel method based on graph convolutional networks to infer potential metabolite-disease association, named MDAGCN. We first calculated three kinds of metabolite similarities and three kinds of disease similarities. The final similarity of disease and metabolite will be obtained by integrating three kinds' similarities of each and filtering out the noise similarity values. Then metabolite similarity network, disease similarity network and known metabolite-disease association network were used to construct a heterogenous network. Finally, heterogeneous network with rich information is fed into the graph convolutional networks to obtain new features of a node through aggregation of node information so as to infer the potential associations between metabolites and diseases. Experimental results show that MDAGCN achieves more reliable results in cross validation and case studies when compared with other existing methods.