Collaborative Framework for circRNA-Disease Associations Prediction Using Dual Variational Graph

Many experiments have shown that circular RNA (circRNA) can act as biomarkers for complex diseases and play significant regulatory roles in multiple pathological processes. However, most circRNA-disease associations remain unknown, and discovering these associations through biological experimental approach is expensive and time-consuming. Taking into account the shortcomings of current methods, we introduce a new collaborative framework that utilizes multi-heterogeneous graphs, along with variational graph auto-encoders (VGAE) to predict associations between circRNA and diseases. First, we build multi-similarity networks using various biological attributes of circRNA and diseases, and integrate these similarity networks. Two subnetworks are constructed from association matrix and combined similarity network, which included a circRNA-based network and a disease-based network. We then employ random walk with restart and Singular Value Decomposition, for feature extraction from the similarity matrix. Finally, we use collaborative framework to predict the circRNAdisease association scores based on the two subnetworks. We integrate the two score matrices to obtain a final prediction scoring matrix. Using 5-fold cross-validation on the CircR2Disease dataset, our model achieved an AUC score of 0.9828 and an AUPR score of 0.9820. Additionally, among the top 30 highest-scoring circRNA-disease association pairs, 26 associations have already been validated. Our model shows strong performance and can accurately predict associations between circRNA and diseases, according to experimental results.