HGAlign: Biologically preserving batch correction and classification for metabolomics via heterogeneous graph...

Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Mass Spectrometry (MALDI-MS) is a powerful tool for profiling complex biological samples. However, large-scale metabolomics experiments often suffer from substantial batch effects caused by variations in sample processing, instrument conditions, and acquisition protocols. These non-biological variations obscure true biological signals, reduce reproducibility, and compromise the generalizability of downstream models. Existing correction methods either rely on oversimplified linear assumptions or risk over-correcting and removing meaningful biological differences. To address this challenge, we propose HGAlign(Heterogeneous Graph Alignment Model), a neural network model that corrects batch effects in large-scale MALDI-MS experiments while preserving important biological differences. Our approach uses heterogeneous graph convolutional networks to learn relationships between samples and metabolic features, enabling effective batch correction without losing disease-related information. Extensive experiments on CyTOF public datasets and clinical MALDI-MS serum data from systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients demonstrate that HGAlign significantly reduces inter-batch discrepancies while maintaining or improving classification accuracy. Quantitative evaluation shows that our method achieves the lowest MMD values among state-of-the-art methods, and consistently improves classification metrics. Moreover, HGAlign avoids over-correction, enabling stable identification of cross-batch differential metabolites that retain biological interpretability. HGAlign offers a principled framework for balancing batch effect removal and biological signal preservation in high-throughput metabolomics. By introducing heterogeneous graph representation learning, it achieves superior performance in both batch correction and disease classification tasks, showing strong potential for large-scale clinical applications.