Drug research and
development is a time-consuming and high-cost
task, pressing an urgent demand to identify novel indications of approved
drugs, referred to as drug repositioning, which provides an economical
and efficient way for drug discovery. With increasing volumes of large-scale
chemical, genomic, and pharmacological data sets generated by the
high-throughput technique, it is crucial to develop systematic and
rational computational approaches to identify new indications of approved
drugs. In this paper, we introduce HNet-DNN, which utilizes a deep
neural network (DNN), to predict new drug–disease associations
based on the features extracted from the drug–disease heterogeneous
network. Instead of the straightforward concatenation of chemical
and phenotypic features as the input of DNN, we used these raw features
of drugs and diseases to construct a drug–drug similarity network
and a disease–disease similarity network, and then built a
drug–disease heterogeneous network by integrating known drug–disease
associations. Subsequently, we extracted topological features for
drug–disease associations from the heterogeneous network and
used them to train a DNN model. Our intensive performance evaluations
demonstrated that HNet-DNN effectively exploits the features of the
heterogeneous network to boost the predictive performance of drug–disease
associations. Compared with a couple of typical classifiers and competitive
approaches, our method not only achieved state-of-the-art performance
but also effectively alleviated the overfitting problem. Moreover,
we ran HNet-DNN to predict new drug–disease associations and
carried out case studies to verify the effectiveness of our method.