A Graph Feature Auto-Encoder for the Prediction of Unobserved Node Features on Biological Networks

Understand

Motivation: Molecular interaction networks summarize complex biological processes as graphs, whose structure is informative of biological function at multiple scales.

• Simultaneously, omics technologies measure the variation or activity of genes, proteins, or metabolites across individuals or experimental conditions.
• Integrating the complementary viewpoints of biological networks and omics data is an important task in bioinformatics, but existing methods treat networks as discrete structures, which are intrinsically difficult to integrate with continuous node features or activity measures.
• Graph neural networks map graph nodes into a low-dimensional vector space representation, and can be trained to preserve both the local graph structure and the similarity between node features.