Computational Method Using Attribute-Aware Message Passing and Graph Convolutional Network for Potential...

MicroRNA (miRNA) dysregulation is a crucial pathogenic factor that extensively participates in the occurrence and progression of various human diseases, especially cancers. Identifying unknown miRNA-disease connections is essential for understanding disease pathogenesis and improving clinical treatment strategies. Traditional biological experiments are often expensive and technically restricted, so computational prediction has become a widely used auxiliary research tool. In this study, we develop a novel predictive model called Attribute-Aware Message Passing Graph Convolutional Network (AAMPGCN) to identify potential miRNA-disease associations. The advantage of AAMPGCN lies in integrating miRNA and disease attribute information into the message-passing process: it partitions the miRNA-disease heterogeneous graph that incorporates miRNA functional similarity, disease semantic similarity, and Gaussian interaction kernel similarity into attribute-homogeneous subgraphs, while restricting high-order message propagation within each subgraph. This mechanism effectively filters cross-attribute noise, preserves the discriminability of miRNA and disease embeddings during deep convolution, and is thus well-adapted to miRNA-disease heterogeneous networks. The AAMPGCN prioritizes miRNA and disease attributes, aggregating messages specifically among nodes with similar attribute characteristics that are relevant to miRNA-disease interactions. Experimental results show that the AAMPGCN model achieves AUC and AUPR values of 94.06 and 93.52 on the HMDD2.0 dataset, which outperforms existing methods. The proposed AAMPGCN provides a new and effective method for miRNA-disease association prediction, and also offers theoretical support for the research on disease molecular mechanisms and the screening of clinical therapeutic targets.