Hierarchical hypergraph learning in association-weighted heterogeneous network for miRNA-disease association identification

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play a significant role in cell differentiation, biological development as well as the occurrence and growth of diseases. Although many computational methods contribute to predicting the association between miRNAs and diseases, they do not fully explore the attribute information contained in associated edges between miRNAs and diseases. In this study, we propose a new method, Hierarchical Hypergraph learning in Association-Weighted heterogeneous network for MiRNA-Disease association identification (HHAWMD). HHAWMD first adaptively fuses multi-view similarities based on channel attention and distinguishes the relevance of different associated relationships according to changes in expression levels of disease-related miRNAs, miRNA similarity information, and disease similarity information. Then, HHAWMD assigns edge weights and attribute features according to the association level to construct an association-weighted heterogeneous graph. Next, HHAWMD extracts the subgraph of the miRNA-disease node pair from the heterogeneous graph and builds the hyperedge (a kind of virtual edge) between the node pair to generate the hypergraph. Finally, HHAWMD proposes a hierarchical hypergraph learning approach, including node-aware attention and hyperedge-aware attention, which aggregates the abundant semantic information contained in deep and shallow neighborhoods to the hyperedge in the hypergraph. Our experiment results suggest that HHAWMD has better performance and can be used as a powerful tool for miRNA-disease association identification. The source code and data of HHAWMD are available at https://github.com/ningq669/HHAWMD/.