Graph Representation Learning Based on Specific Subgraphs for Biomedical Interaction Prediction

Discovering the novel associations of biomedical entities is of great significance and can facilitate not only the identification of network biomarkers of disease but also the search for putative drug targets. Graph representation learning (GRL) has incredible potential to efficiently predict the interactions from biomedical networks by modeling the robust representation for each node. However, the current GRL-based methods learn the representation of nodes by aggregating the features of their neighbors with equal weights. Furthermore, they also fail to identify which features of higher-order neighbors are integrated into the representation of the central node. In this work, we propose a novel graph representation learning framework: a multi-order graph neural network based on reconstructed specific subgraphs (MGRS) for biomedical interaction prediction. In the MGRS, we apply the multi-order graph aggregation module (MOGA) to learn the wide-view representation by integrating the multi-hop neighbor features. Besides, we propose a subgraph selection module (SGSM) to reconstruct the specific subgraph with adaptive edge weights for each node. SGSM can clearly explore the dependency of the node representation on the neighbor features and learn the subgraph-based representation based on the reconstructed weighted subgraphs. Extensive experimental results on four public biomedical networks demonstrate that the MGRS performs better and is more robust than the latest baselines.