DRGAT: Predicting Drug Responses Via Diffusion-Based Graph Attention Network

Accurately predicting drug response depending on a patient's genomic profile is critical for advancing personalized medicine. Deep learning approaches rise and especially the rise of graph neural networks leveraging large-scale omics datasets have been a key driver of research in this area. However, these biological datasets, which are typically high dimensional but have small sample sizes, present challenges such as overfitting and poor generalization in predictive models. As a complicating matter, gene expression (GE) data must capture complex inter-gene relationships, exacerbating these issues. In this article, we tackle these challenges by introducing a drug response prediction method, called drug response graph attention network (DRGAT), which combines a denoising diffusion implicit model for data augmentation with a recently introduced graph attention network (GAT) with high-order neighbor propagation (HO-GATs) prediction module. Our proposed approach achieved almost 5% improvement in the area under receiver operating characteristic curve compared with state-of-the-art models for the many studied drugs, indicating our method's reasonable generalization capabilities. Moreover, our experiments confirm the potential of diffusion-based generative models, a core component of our method, to mitigate the inherent limitations of omics datasets by effectively augmenting GE data.