Using computational models to predict potential lncRNA-disease
associations (LDAs) has emerged as an effective supplement to bioexperiments
for exploring the pathogenesis of diseases. However, current computational
models still face limitations in their ability to learn the complex
features of bionetworks. In this study, HGCNLDA, a model which combines
graph convolutional network (GCN)-based aggregation, heterogeneous
information fusion, and a bilinear-decoder to infer LDAs was proposed.
Recognizing the need to extract essential features during data processing,
our HGCNLDA explored four key steps for uncovering interaction patterns
within the bionetwork: (1) a novel type of tripartite heterogeneous
network, known as the lncRNA-disease-miRNA network (LDMN), was constructed
using computed similarities and known associations. (2) Homogeneous
and heterogeneous features of nodes were extracted from domains within
the LDMN by a GCN-based encoder. (3) Feature fusions, including bipolymerization
operations and attention mechanism, were employed to capture a more
accurate and comprehensive representation of nodes. (4) Bilinear-decoder
was used to rebuild the edge type (or rating type) for a specific
node pair, resulting in the predicted association score. Through a
5-fold cross-validation on two data sets, namely, data set1 and data
set2, our HGCNLDA consistently demonstrated superior performance compared
to five related models. It almost achieved the highest AUROC and AUPR
values on both data sets, especially on data set2 where the results
obtained were more challenging and objective. Case studies involving
three real cancer scenarios further validated the practicality of
HGCNLDA in identifying potential LDAs in real-world contexts. The
source code and data for this study are available at .