DGPDHGCN: A Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network Method for Predicting Drug-Disease Associations

Drug repositioning is a crucial aspect of biomedical research, and predicting drug-disease associations (DDAs) is a critical step in this process. With the development of deep learning and neural network technologies, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved significant performances in this research field. Although existing DDAs models have made substantial progress, there is still need for improvement in sufficiently utilizing and integrating information from multiple biological entities. In this study, we propose a Drug-Gene-Protein-Disease Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (DGPDHGCN) model for drug-disease association prediction. First, we construct a heterogeneous network from multiple data sources and establish meta-paths based on the topological information of biological entities. Then, the DGPDHGCN model learns representations of drugs and diseases from similarity and association data of those entities. Finally, we define a score function to quantify the associations between drugs and diseases. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DGPDHGCN outperforms baseline models in DDAs prediction tasks in terms of metrics such as AUPR, F1-score, precision, and recall. The source code and experimental datasets can be found in https://github.com/Saxon0918/DGPDHGCN