Predicting circRNA-disease associations with shared units and multi-channel attention mechanisms

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) have been identified as key players in the progression of several diseases; however, their roles have not yet been determined because of the high financial burden of biological studies. This highlights the urgent need to develop efficient computational models that can predict circRNA-disease associations, offering an alternative approach to overcome the limitations of expensive experimental studies. Although multi-view learning methods have been widely adopted, most approaches fail to fully exploit the latent information across views, while simultaneously overlooking the fact that different views contribute to varying degrees of significance.

This study presents a method that combines multi-view shared units and multichannel attention mechanisms to predict circRNA-disease associations (MSMCDA). MSMCDA first constructs similarity and meta-path networks for circRNAs and diseases by introducing shared units to facilitate interactive learning across distinct network features. Subsequently, multichannel attention mechanisms were used to optimize the weights within similarity networks. Finally, contrastive learning strengthened the similarity features. Experiments on five public datasets demonstrated that MSMCDA significantly outperformed other baseline methods. Additionally, case studies on colorectal cancer, gastric cancer, and nonsmall cell lung cancer confirmed the effectiveness of MSMCDA in uncovering new associations.

The source code and data are available at https://github.com/zhangxue2115/MSMCDA.git.