iPiDA-LGE: a local and global graph ensemble learning framework for identifying piRNA-disease associations

Background: Exploring piRNA-disease associations can help discover candidate diagnostic or prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Several computational methods have been presented for identifying associations between piRNAs and diseases. However, the existing methods encounter challenges such as over-smoothing in feature learning and overlooking specific local proximity relationships, resulting in limited representation of piRNA-disease pairs and insufficient detection of association patterns. Results: In this study, we propose a novel computational method called iPiDA-LGE for piRNA-disease association identification. iPiDA-LGE comprises two graph convolutional neural network modules based on local and global piRNA-disease graphs, aimed at capturing specific and general features of piRNA-disease pairs. Additionally, it integrates their refined and macroscopic inferences to derive the final prediction result. Conclusions: The experimental results show that iPiDA-LGE effectively leverages the advantages of both local and global graph learning, thereby achieving more discriminative pair representation and superior predictive performance.