Soft-Evidence Fused Graph Neural Network for Cancer Driver Gene Identification across Multi-View Biological Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chen, Bang, Guo, Lijun, Fan, Houli, He, Wentao, Zhang, Rong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Chen, Bang
Guo, Lijun
Fan, Houli
He, Wentao
Zhang, Rong
author_facet Chen, Bang
Guo, Lijun
Fan, Houli
He, Wentao
Zhang, Rong
contents Identifying cancer driver genes (CDGs) is essential for understanding cancer mechanisms and developing targeted therapies. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently been employed to identify CDGs by capturing patterns in biological interaction networks. However, most GNN-based approaches rely on a single protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, ignoring complementary information from other biological networks. Some studies integrate multiple networks by aligning features with consistency constraints to learn unified gene representations for CDG identification. However, such representation-level fusion often assumes congruent gene relationships across networks, which may overlook network heterogeneity and introduce conflicting information. To address this, we propose Soft-Evidence Fusion Graph Neural Network (SEFGNN), a novel framework for CDG identification across multiple networks at the decision level. Instead of enforcing feature-level consistency, SEFGNN treats each biological network as an independent evidence source and performs uncertainty-aware fusion at the decision level using Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST). To alleviate the risk of overconfidence from DST, we further introduce a Soft Evidence Smoothing (SES) module that improves ranking stability while preserving discriminative performance. Experiments on three cancer datasets show that SEFGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits strong potential in discovering novel CDGs.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06290
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Soft-Evidence Fused Graph Neural Network for Cancer Driver Gene Identification across Multi-View Biological Graphs
Chen, Bang
Guo, Lijun
Fan, Houli
He, Wentao
Zhang, Rong
Genomics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Identifying cancer driver genes (CDGs) is essential for understanding cancer mechanisms and developing targeted therapies. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently been employed to identify CDGs by capturing patterns in biological interaction networks. However, most GNN-based approaches rely on a single protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, ignoring complementary information from other biological networks. Some studies integrate multiple networks by aligning features with consistency constraints to learn unified gene representations for CDG identification. However, such representation-level fusion often assumes congruent gene relationships across networks, which may overlook network heterogeneity and introduce conflicting information. To address this, we propose Soft-Evidence Fusion Graph Neural Network (SEFGNN), a novel framework for CDG identification across multiple networks at the decision level. Instead of enforcing feature-level consistency, SEFGNN treats each biological network as an independent evidence source and performs uncertainty-aware fusion at the decision level using Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST). To alleviate the risk of overconfidence from DST, we further introduce a Soft Evidence Smoothing (SES) module that improves ranking stability while preserving discriminative performance. Experiments on three cancer datasets show that SEFGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits strong potential in discovering novel CDGs.
title Soft-Evidence Fused Graph Neural Network for Cancer Driver Gene Identification across Multi-View Biological Graphs
topic Genomics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06290