ACLNDA: an asymmetric graph contrastive learning framework for predicting noncoding RNA-disease associations in heterogeneous graphs.

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Noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), including long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), play crucial roles in gene expression regulation and are significant in disease associations and medical research. Accurate ncRNA-disease association prediction is essential for understanding disease mechanisms and developing treatments. Existing methods often focus on single tasks like lncRNA-disease associations (LDAs), miRNA-disease associations (MDAs), or lncRNA-miRNA interactions (LMIs), and fail to exploit heterogeneous graph characteristics. We propose ACLNDA, an asymmetric graph contrastive learning framework for analyzing heterophilic ncRNA-disease associations. It constructs inter-layer adjacency matrices from the original lncRNA, miRNA, and disease associations, and uses a Top-K intra-layer similarity edges construction approach to form a triple-layer heterogeneous graph. Unlike traditional works, to account for both node attribute features (ncRNA/disease) and node preference features (association), ACLNDA employs an asymmetric yet simple graph contrastive learning framework to maximize one-hop neighborhood context and two-hop similarity, extracting ncRNA-disease features without relying on graph augmentations or homophily assumptions, reducing computational cost while preserving data integrity. Our framework is capable of being applied to a universal range of potential LDA, MDA, and LMI association predictions. Further experimental results demonstrate superior performance to other existing state-of-the-art baseline methods, which shows its potential for providing insights into disease diagnosis and therapeutic target identification. The source code and data of ACLNDA is publicly available at https://github.com/AI4Bread/ACLNDA.