HGTDG: An Interpretable Heterogeneous Graph Transformer Framework for Cancer Driver Gene Prediction

Accurately predicting cancer driver genes remains challenging due to the increasing size and complexity of cancer genomic data. In this study, HGTDG is proposed, a heterogeneous graph transformer framework for predicting cancer driver genes and exploring downstream tasks. The framework includes a heterogeneous graph construction module that constructs a gene-protein heterogeneous network based on KEGG pathways and the protein-protein interactions from the STRING database. In addition, the framework introduces a novel heterogeneous graph transformer module that uses multi-head attention mechanisms for gene node embedding. The transformer module can capture dedicated representations for genes and edges. Finally, the generated gene embeddings are fed into the classification module to classify genes into driver and non-driver genes. The experiment results show that HGTDG outperforms the state-of-the-art methods regarding the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUROC) and the area under the precision-recall curves (AUPRC).