iPiDA-SWGCN: Identification of piRNA-disease associations based on Supplementarily Weighted Graph Convolutional Network

Accurately identifying potential piRNA-disease associations is of great importance in uncovering the pathogenesis of diseases. Recently, several machine-learning-based methods have been proposed for piRNA-disease association detection. However, they are suffering from the high sparsity of piRNA-disease association network and the Boolean representation of piRNA-disease associations ignoring the confidence coefficients. In this study, we propose a supplementarily weighted strategy to solve these disadvantages. Combined with Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), a novel predictor called iPiDA-SWGCN is proposed for piRNA-disease association prediction. There are three main contributions of iPiDA-SWGCN: (i) Potential piRNA-disease associations are preliminarily supplemented in the sparse piRNA-disease network by integrating various basic predictors to enrich network structure information. (ii) The original Boolean piRNA-disease associations are assigned with different relevance confidence to learn node representations from neighbour nodes in varying degrees. (iii) The experimental results show that iPiDA-SWGCN achieves the best performance compared with the other state-of-the-art methods, and can predict new piRNA-disease associations.