Graph neural network and multi-data heterogeneous networks for microbe-disease prediction

The research on microbe association networks is greatly significant for understanding the pathogenic mechanism of microbes and promoting the application of microbes in precision medicine. In this paper, we studied the prediction of microbe-disease associations based on multi-data biological network and graph neural network algorithm. The HMDAD database provided a dataset that included 39 diseases, 292 microbes, and 450 known microbe-disease associations. We proposed a Microbe-Disease Heterogeneous Network according to the microbe similarity network, disease similarity network, and known microbe-disease associations. Furthermore, we integrated the network into the graph convolutional neural network algorithm and developed the GCNN4Micro-Dis model to predict microbe-disease associations. Finally, the performance of the GCNN4Micro-Dis model was evaluated via 5-fold cross-validation. We randomly divided all known microbe-disease association data into five groups. The results showed that the average AUC value and standard deviation were 0.8954 ± 0.0030. Our model had good predictive power and can help identify new microbe-disease associations. In addition, we compared GCNN4Micro-Dis with three advanced methods to predict microbe-disease associations, KATZHMDA, BiRWHMDA, and LRLSHMDA. The results showed that our method had better prediction performance than the other three methods. Furthermore, we selected breast cancer as a case study and found the top 12 microbes related to breast cancer from the intestinal flora of patients, which further verified the model’s accuracy.