A model for predicting drug-disease associations based on dense convolutional attention network

The development of new drugs is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Therefore, researchers use computational methods to explore other therapeutic effects of existing drugs, and drug-disease association prediction is an important branch of it. The existing drug-disease association prediction method ignored the prior knowledge contained in the drug-disease association data, which provided a strong basis for the research. Moreover, the previous methods only paid attention to the high-level features in the network when extracting features, and directly fused or connected them in series, resulting in the loss of information. Therefore, we propose a novel deep learning model for drug-disease association prediction, called DCNN. The model introduces the Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity for drugs and diseases, and combines them with the structural similarity of drugs and the semantic similarity of diseases to construct the feature space jointly. Then dense convolutional neural network (DenseCNN) is used to capture the feature information of drugs and diseases, and introduces a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to weight features from the channel and space levels to achieve adaptive optimization of features. The ten-fold cross-validation results of the model DCNN and the experimental results of the case study show that it is superior to the existing drug-disease association predictors and effectively predicts the drug-disease associations.