DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btad748 ISSN: 1367-4803

Drug repositioning with adaptive graph convolutional networks

Xinliang Sun, Xiao Jia, Zhangli Lu, Jing Tang, Min Li
  • Computational Mathematics
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Molecular Biology
  • Biochemistry
  • Statistics and Probability

Abstract

Motivation

Drug repositioning is an effective strategy to identify new indications for existing drugs, providing the quickest possible transition from bench to bedside. With the rapid development of deep learning, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been widely adopted for drug repositioning tasks. However, prior GCNs based methods exist limitations in deeply integrating node features and topological structures, which may hinder the capability of GCNs.

Results

In this study, we propose an adaptive graph convolutional networks approach, termed AdaDR, for drug repositioning by deeply integrating node features and topological structures. Distinct from conventional graph convolution networks, AdaDR models interactive information between them with adaptive graph convolution operation, which enhances the expression of model. Concretely, AdaDR simultaneously extracts embeddings from node features and topological structures and then uses the attention mechanism to learn adaptive importance weights of the embeddings. Experimental results show that AdaDR achieves better performance than multiple baselines for drug repositioning. Moreover, in the case study, exploratory analyses are offered for finding novel drug-disease associations.

Availability and implementation

The implementation of AdaDR and the preprocessed data is available at: https://github.com/xinliangSun/AdaDR.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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