MGACL: Prediction Drug–Protein Interaction Based on Meta-Graph Association-Aware Contrastive Learning

The identification of drug-target interaction (DTI) is crucial for drug discovery. However, how to reduce the graph neural network's false positives due to its bias and negative transfer in the original bipartite graph remains to be clarified. Considering that the impact of heterogeneous auxiliary information on DTI varies depending on the drug and target, we established an adaptive enhanced personalized meta-knowledge transfer network named <b>M</b>eta <b>G</b>raph <b>A</b>ssociation-Aware <b>C</b>ontrastive <b>L</b>earning (MGACL), which can transfer personalized heterogeneous auxiliary information from different nodes and reduce data bias. Meanwhile, we propose a novel DTI association-aware contrastive learning strategy that aligns high-frequency drug representations with learned auxiliary graph representations to prevent negative transfer. Our study improves the DTI prediction performance by about 3%, evaluated by analyzing the area under the curve (AUC) and area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) compared with existing methods, which is more conducive to accurately identifying drug targets for the development of new drugs.