iGATTLDA: Integrative graph attention and transformer-based model for predicting lncRNA-Disease associations

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have emerged as significant contributors to the regulation of various biological processes, and their dysregulation has been linked to a variety of human disorders. Accurate prediction of potential correlations between lncRNAs and diseases is crucial for advancing disease diagnostics and treatment procedures. The authors introduced a novel computational method, iGATTLDA, for the prediction of lncRNA-disease associations. The model utilised lncRNA and disease similarity matrices, with known associations represented in an adjacency matrix. A heterogeneous network was constructed, dissecting lncRNAs and diseases as nodes and their associations as edges. The Graph Attention Network (GAT) is employed to process initial features and corresponding adjacency information. GAT identified significant neighbouring nodes in the network, capturing intricate relationships between lncRNAs and diseases, and generating new feature representations. Subsequently, the transformer captures global dependencies and interactions across the entire sequence of features produced by the GAT. Consequently, iGATTLDA successfully captures complex relationships and interactions that conventional approaches may overlook. In evaluating iGATTLDA, it attained an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) of 0.95 and an area under the precision recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.96 with a two-layer multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier. These results were notably higher compared to the majority of previously proposed models, further substantiating the model’s efficiency in predicting potential lncRNA-disease associations by incorporating both local and global interactions. The implementation details can be obtained from https://github.com/momanyibiffon/iGATTLDA.