• Evan Yu, Jingcheng Du, Yang Xiang, Xinyue Hu, Jingna Feng, Xi Luo, John A Schneider, Degui Zhi, Kayo Fujimoto, and Cui Tao.
• School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, USA.
• Ann. Med. 2024 Dec 1; 56 (1): 24070632407063.

ObjectiveInvestigation of explainable deep learning methods for graph neural networks to predict HIV infections with social network information and performing domain adaptation to evaluate model transferability across different datasets.MethodsNetwork data from two cohorts of younger sexual minority men (SMM) from two U.S. cities (Chicago, IL, and Houston, TX) were collected between 2014 and 2016. Feature importance from graph attention network (GAT) models were determined using GNNExplainer. Domain adaptation was performed to examine model transferability from one city dataset to the other dataset, training with 100% of the source dataset with 30% of the target dataset and prediction on the remaining 70% from the target dataset.ResultsDomain adaptation showed the ability of GAT to improve prediction over training with single city datasets. Feature importance analysis with GAT models in single city training indicated similar features across different cities, reinforcing potential application of GAT models in predicting HIV infections through domain adaptation.ConclusionGAT models can be used to address the data sparsity issue in HIV study populations. They are powerful tools for predicting individual risk of HIV that can be further explored for better understanding of HIV transmission.

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