Abstract

Background: Complex and diverse microbial communities play a pivotal role in human health and have become a new drug target. Exploring the connections between drugs and microbes not only provides profound insights into their mechanisms but also drives progress in drug discovery and repurposing. The use of wet lab experiments to identify associations is time-consuming and laborious. Hence, the advancement of precise and efficient computational methods can effectively improve the efficiency of association identification between microorganisms and drugs.

Objective: In this experiment, we propose a new deep learning model, a new multiview comparative hypergraph attention network (MCHAN) method for human microbe–drug association prediction.

Methods: First, we fuse multiple similarity matrices to obtain a fused microbial and drug similarity network. By combining graph convolutional networks with attention mechanisms, we extract key information from multiple perspectives. Then, we construct two network topologies based on the above fused data. One topology incorporates the concept of hypernodes to capture implicit relationships between microbes and drugs using virtual nodes to construct a hyperheterogeneous graph. Next, we propose a cross-contrastive learning task that facilitates the simultaneous guidance of graph embeddings from both perspectives, without the need for any labels. This approach allows us to bring nodes with similar features and network topologies closer while pushing away other nodes. Finally, we employ attention mechanisms to merge the outputs of the GCN and predict the associations between drugs and microbes.

Results: To confirm the effectiveness of this method, we conduct experiments on three distinct datasets. The results demonstrate that the MCHAN model surpasses other methods in terms of performance. Furthermore, case studies provide additional evidence confirming the consistent predictive accuracy of the MCHAN model.

Conclusion: MCHAN is expected to become a valuable tool for predicting potential associations between microbiota and drugs in the future.

Keywords: Microbe–drug associations, deep learning, multiview networks, attention mechanisms, hyperheterogeneous, contrastive learning, graph convolutional networks.

Graphical Abstract