Exploring novel disease-disease associations based on multi-view fusion network

Established taxonomy system based on disease symptom and tissue characteristics have provided an important basis for physicians to correctly identify diseases and treat them successfully. However, these classifications tend to be based on phenotypic observations, lacking a molecular biological foundation. Therefore, there is an urgent to integrate multi-dimensional molecular biological information or multi-omics data to redefine disease classification in order to provide a powerful perspective for understanding the molecular structure of diseases. Therefore, we offer a flexible disease classification that integrates the biological process, gene expression, and symptom phenotype of diseases, and propose a disease-disease association network based on multi-view fusion. We applied the fusion approach to 223 diseases and divided them into 24 disease clusters. The contribution of internal and external edges of disease clusters were analyzed. The results of the fusion model were compared with Medical Subject Headings, a traditional and commonly used disease taxonomy. Then, experimental results of model performance comparison show that our approach performs better than other integration methods. As it was observed, the obtained clusters provided more interesting and novel disease-disease associations. This multi-view human disease association network describes relationships between diseases based on multiple molecular levels, thus breaking through the limitation of the disease classification system based on tissues and organs. This approach which motivates clinicians and researchers to reposition the understanding of diseases and explore diagnosis and therapy strategies, extends the existing disease taxonomy.

The preprocessed dataset and source code supporting the conclusions of this article are available at GitHub repository https://github.com/yangxiaoxi89/mvHDN.