Ensembles of Graph Attention Networks Supervised by Genotype-to-Phenotype Structures Improved Genomic Prediction Performance

Accurate selection of favourable crop genotypes has motivated the exploration of diverse prediction algorithms for crop breeding applications. One genomic prediction method that has not been fully explored is graph attention networks (GAT). By directly analysing graphical data with the attention mechanism, GAT can incorporate the genotype-to-phenotype (G2P) structure to regularise predictions. As one potential G2P structure, a gene network can be inferred from interpretable machine learning models to effectively learn key features of prediction patterns, potentially improving prediction performance. Here, we investigated whether incorporating such data-driven prior knowledge into GAT improved prediction performance compared to GAT models representing a continuum of G2P structures, ranging from infinitesimal to fully connected. Applying the Diversity Prediction Theorem, we also combined these diverse G2P structures into an ensemble of GAT genomic prediction models to integrate complementary strengths of multiple models. The results for flowering time traits in two maize nested association mapping datasets showed a lack of consistent performance improvement in the data-driven prior knowledge GAT model. However, consistent outperformance was observed for the ensemble of GAT models. Improved predictions from the ensemble model may be driven by its ability to capture a more complete representation of the inferred gene network through the integration of information from diverse G2P structures. The observed results using the GAT methodology provided the foundation for potential performance improvement using GAT by integrating biological prior knowledge derived from omics data and empirically verified gene interactions in future research, thereby potentially enhancing the GAT ensemble performance.