RDDriver: A novel method based on multi-layer heterogeneous transcriptional regulation network for identifying pancreatic cancer biomarker

Pancreatic cancer is a malignant cancer with rapid progression and poor prognosis. The use of transcriptional data can be effective in finding cancer biomarkers. Most of the existing network-based methods do not study RNA, rely on prior or mutation information, or can only achieve classification tasks. In this paper, wep ropose a method combining Relational Graph Convolutional Network and Deep Q-Network called RDDriver to identify pancreatic cancer biomarkers based on multi-layer heterogeneous transcriptional regulation network. We first construct a regulation network containing three types RNAs. Then, Relational Graph Convolutional Network is used to learn the node representation. Finally, we combine the idea of Deep Q-Network to prioritize each RNA with the network controllability theory. We train RDDriver on three simulated small networks, and calculate the average score after applying the model parameters to the regulation networks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we compare RDDriver with other eight methods based on the approximate cancer drivers benchmark RNAs.