GMHAN: a heterogeneous graph attention framework for prioritizing coding and non-coding driver genes

Cancer, a disease of high complexity. Identifying cancer driver genes is fundamental for elucidating oncogenesis and promoting precision medicine. Currently, most approaches mainly focus on homogeneous gene networks and single-omics data, thereby mainly identifying coding driver genes while ignoring non-coding driver genes.

Thus, we introduced GMHAN, a novel framework based on HAN. Firstly, we integrated the three types of omics data of genes and PPI network topology feature, together with the multi-dimensional features of miRNAs. Afterwards, we used heterogeneous graph attention networks to obtain deep feature embeddings of genes and miRNAs. Finally, the deep feature embeddings are input multilayer perceptron to obtain the probability that genes and miRNAs being cancer drivers. In a comparative evaluation against seven methods, GMHAN demonstrates better performance across both pan-cancer and cancer-specific datasets, achieving higher scores in AUC and AUPR. It has confirmed its effectiveness in identifying carcinogenic drivers.

The source code of GMHAN is available at: https://github.com/mping315/GMHAN and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20154736.