MGREL: A multi-graph representation learning-based ensemble learning method for gene-disease association prediction

The identification of gene-disease associations plays an important role in the exploration of pathogenic mechanisms and therapeutic targets. Computational methods have been regarded as an effective way to discover the potential gene-disease associations in recent years. However, most of them ignored the combination of abundant genetic, therapeutic information, and gene-disease network topology. To this end, we re-organized the current gene-disease association benchmark dataset by extracting the newest gene-disease associations from the OMIM database. Then, we developed a multi-graph representation learning-based ensemble model, named MGREL to predict gene-disease associations. MGREL integrated two feature generation channels to extract gene and disease features, including a knowledge extraction channel which learned high-order representations from genetic and therapeutic information, and a graph learning channel which acquired network topological representations through multiple advanced graph representation learning methods. Then, an ensemble learning method with 5 machine learning models was used as the classifier to predict the gene-disease association. Comprehensive experiments have demonstrated the significant performance achieved by MGREL compared to 5 state-of-the-art methods. For the major measurements (AUC = 0.925, AUPR = 0.935), the relative improvements of MGREL compared to the suboptimal methods are 3.24%, and 2.75%, respectively. MGREL also achieved impressive improvements in the challenging tasks of predicting potential associations for unknown genes/diseases. In addition, case studies implied potential applications for MGREL in the discovery of potential therapeutic targets.