A graph auto-encoder model for miRNA-disease associations prediction

DNRLCNN: A CNN Framework for Identifying MiRNA-Disease Associations Using Latent Feature Matrix Extraction with Positive Samples

Emerging evidence indicates that miRNAs have strong relationships with many human diseases. Investigating the associations will contribute to elucidating the activities of miRNAs and pathogenesis mechanisms, and providing new opportunities for disease diagnosis and drug discovery. Therefore, it is of significance to identify potential associations between miRNAs and diseases. The existing databases about the miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) only provide the known MDAs, which can be regarded as positive samples. However, the unknown MDAs are not sufficient to regard as reliable negative samples. To deal with this uncertainty, we proposed a convolutional neural network (CNN) framework, named DNRLCNN, based on a latent feature matrix extracted by only positive samples to predict MDAs. First, by only considering the positive samples into the calculation process, we captured the latent feature matrix for complex interactions between miRNAs and diseases in low-dimensional space. Then, we constructed a feature vector for each miRNA and disease pair based on the feature representation. Finally, we adopted a modified CNN for the feature vector to predict MDAs. As a result, our model achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods which based CNN in fivefold cross-validation on both miRNA-disease association prediction task (average AUC of 0.9030) and miRNA-phenotype association prediction task (average AUC of 0. 9442). In addition, we carried out case studies on two human diseases, and all the top-50 predicted miRNAs for lung neoplasms are confirmed by HMDD v3.2 and dbDEMC 2.0 databases, 98% of the top-50 predicted miRNAs for heart failure are confirmed. The experiment results show that our model has the capability of inferring potential disease-related miRNAs.

Predicting miRNA-disease associations via learning multimodal networks and fusing mixed neighborhood information

MOTIVATION

In recent years, a large number of biological experiments have strongly shown that miRNAs play an important role in understanding disease pathogenesis. The discovery of miRNA-disease associations is beneficial for disease diagnosis and treatment. Since inferring these associations through biological experiments is time-consuming and expensive, researchers have sought to identify the associations utilizing computational approaches. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), which exhibit excellent performance in link prediction problems, have been successfully used in miRNA-disease association prediction. However, GCNs only consider 1st-order neighborhood information at one layer but fail to capture information from high-order neighbors to learn miRNA and disease representations through information propagation. Therefore, how to aggregate information from high-order neighborhood effectively in an explicit way is still challenging.

RESULTS

To address such a challenge, we propose a novel method called mixed neighborhood information for miRNA-disease association (MINIMDA), which could fuse mixed high-order neighborhood information of miRNAs and diseases in multimodal networks. First, MINIMDA constructs the integrated miRNA similarity network and integrated disease similarity network respectively with their multisource information. Then, the embedding representations of miRNAs and diseases are obtained by fusing mixed high-order neighborhood information from multimodal network which are the integrated miRNA similarity network, integrated disease similarity network and the miRNA-disease association networks. Finally, we concentrate the multimodal embedding representations of miRNAs and diseases and feed them into the multilayer perceptron (MLP) to predict their underlying associations. Extensive experimental results show that MINIMDA is superior to other state-of-the-art methods overall. Moreover, the outstanding performance on case studies for esophageal cancer, colon tumor and lung cancer further demonstrates the effectiveness of MINIMDA.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

https://github.com/chengxu123/MINIMDA and http://120.79.173.96/.

Predicting multiple types of MicroRNA-disease associations based on tensor factorization and label propagation

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important regulatory roles in the pathogenesis and progression of diseases. Most existing bioinformatics methods only study miRNA-disease binary association prediction. However, there are many types of associations between miRNA and disease. In addition, the miRNA-disease-type association dataset has inherent noise and incompleteness. In this paper, a novel method based on tensor factorization and label propagation (TFLP) is proposed to alleviate the above problems. First, as an effective tensor factorization method, tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) is applied to the original multiple-type miRNA-disease associations to obtain a clean and complete low-rank prediction tensor. Second, the Gaussian interaction profile (GIP) kernel is used to describe the similarity of disease pairs and the similarity of miRNA pairs. Then, they are combined with disease semantic similarity and miRNA functional similarity to obtain an integrated disease similarity network and an integrated miRNA similarity network, respectively. Finally, the low-rank association tensor and the biological similarity as auxiliary information are introduced into label propagation. The prediction performance of the algorithm is improved by iterative propagation of labeled information to unlabeled samples. Extensive experiments reveal that the proposed TFLP method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for predicting multiple types of miRNA-disease associations. The data and source codes are available at https://github.com/nayu0419/TFLP.

Identification of miRNA-disease associations via deep forest ensemble learning based on autoencoder

Increasing evidences show that the occurrence of human complex diseases is closely related to microRNA (miRNA) variation and imbalance. For this reason, predicting disease-related miRNAs is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of complex human diseases. Although some current computational methods can effectively predict potential disease-related miRNAs, the accuracy of prediction should be further improved. In our study, a new computational method via deep forest ensemble learning based on autoencoder (DFELMDA) is proposed to predict miRNA-disease associations. Specifically, a new feature representation strategy is proposed to obtain different types of feature representations (from miRNA and disease) for each miRNA-disease association. Then, two types of low-dimensional feature representations are extracted by two deep autoencoders for predicting miRNA-disease associations. Finally, two prediction scores of the miRNA-disease associations are obtained by the deep random forest and combined to determine the final results. DFELMDA is compared with several classical methods on the The Human microRNA Disease Database (HMDD) dataset. Results reveal that the performance of this method is superior. The area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) values obtained by DFELMDA through 5-fold and 10-fold cross-validation are 0.9552 and 0.9560, respectively. In addition, case studies on colon, breast and lung tumors of different disease types further demonstrate the excellent ability of DFELMDA to predict disease-associated miRNA-disease. Performance analysis shows that DFELMDA can be used as an effective computational tool for predicting miRNA-disease associations.

DWPPI: A Deep Learning Approach for Predicting Protein–Protein Interactions in Plants Based on Multi-Source Information With a Large-Scale Biological Network

The prediction of protein–protein interactions (PPIs) in plants is vital for probing the cell function. Although multiple high-throughput approaches in the biological domain have been developed to identify PPIs, with the increasing complexity of PPI network, these methods fall into laborious and time-consuming situations. Thus, it is essential to develop an effective and feasible computational method for the prediction of PPIs in plants. In this study, we present a network embedding-based method, called DWPPI, for predicting the interactions between different plant proteins based on multi-source information and combined with deep neural networks (DNN). The DWPPI model fuses the protein natural language sequence information (attribute information) and protein behavior information to represent plant proteins as feature vectors and finally sends these features to a deep learning–based classifier for prediction. To validate the prediction performance of DWPPI, we performed it on three model plant datasets: Arabidopsis thaliana (A. thaliana), mazie (Zea mays), and rice (Oryza sativa). The experimental results with the fivefold cross-validation technique demonstrated that DWPPI obtains great performance with the AUC (area under ROC curves) values of 0.9548, 0.9867, and 0.9213, respectively. To further verify the predictive capacity of DWPPI, we compared it with some different state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers. Moreover, case studies were performed with the AC149810.2_FGP003 protein. As a result, 14 of the top 20 PPI pairs identified by DWPPI with the highest scores were confirmed by the literature. These excellent results suggest that the DWPPI model can act as a promising tool for related plant molecular biology.

Predicting miRNA-Disease Association Based on Neural Inductive Matrix Completion with Graph Autoencoders and Self-Attention Mechanism

Many studies have clarified that microRNAs (miRNAs) are associated with many human diseases. Therefore, it is essential to predict potential miRNA-disease associations for disease pathogenesis and treatment. Numerous machine learning and deep learning approaches have been adopted to this problem. In this paper, we propose a Neural Inductive Matrix completion-based method with Graph Autoencoders (GAE) and Self-Attention mechanism for miRNA-disease associations prediction (NIMGSA). Some of the previous works based on matrix completion ignore the importance of label propagation procedure for inferring miRNA-disease associations, while others cannot integrate matrix completion and label propagation effectively. Varying from previous studies, NIMGSA unifies inductive matrix completion and label propagation via neural network architecture, through the collaborative training of two graph autoencoders. This neural inductive matrix completion-based method is also an implementation of self-attention mechanism for miRNA-disease associations prediction. This end-to-end framework can strengthen the robustness and preciseness of both matrix completion and label propagation. Cross validations indicate that NIMGSA outperforms current miRNA-disease prediction methods. Case studies demonstrate that NIMGSA is competent in detecting potential miRNA-disease associations.

GCAEMDA: Predicting miRNA-disease associations via graph convolutional autoencoder

microRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs related to a number of complicated biological processes. A growing body of studies have suggested that miRNAs are closely associated with many human diseases. It is meaningful to consider disease-related miRNAs as potential biomarkers, which could greatly contribute to understanding the mechanisms of complex diseases and benefit the prevention, detection, diagnosis and treatment of extraordinary diseases. In this study, we presented a novel model named Graph Convolutional Autoencoder for miRNA-Disease Association Prediction (GCAEMDA). In the proposed model, we utilized miRNA-miRNA similarities, disease-disease similarities and verified miRNA-disease associations to construct a heterogeneous network, which is applied to learn the embeddings of miRNAs and diseases. In addition, we separately constructed miRNA-based and disease-based sub-networks. Combining the embeddings of miRNAs and diseases, graph convolutional autoencoder (GCAE) was utilized to calculate association scores of miRNA-disease on two sub-networks, respectively. Furthermore, we obtained final prediction scores between miRNAs and diseases by adopting an average ensemble way to integrate the prediction scores from two types of subnetworks. To indicate the accuracy of GCAEMDA, we applied different cross validation methods to evaluate our model whose performances were better than the state-of-the-art models. Case studies on a common human diseases were also implemented to prove the effectiveness of GCAEMDA. The results demonstrated that GCAEMDA was beneficial to infer potential associations of miRNA-disease.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that miRNAs are closely related to several common human diseases, so observing unverified associations between miRNAs and diseases is conducive to the diagnose and treatment of complex diseases. Considerable models proposed to infer potential miRNA-disease associations have made the prediction more effective and productive. We constructed GCAEMDA model to acquire more accuracy prediction result by integrating graph convolutional network and autoencoder to make prediction based on multi-source miRNA and disease information. The five-fold cross validation and global leave-one-out cross validation were implemented to evaluate the performance of our model. Consequently, GCAEMDA reached AUCs of 0.9415 and 0.9505 respectively that were distinctly higher than AUCs of other comparative models. Furthermore, we carried out case studies on lung neoplasms and breast neoplasms to demonstrate the practical application of the model, 47 and 47 of top-50 candidate miRNAs were confirmed by experimental reports. In summary, GCAEMDA could be considered as an effective and accuracy model to reveal relationship between miRNAs and diseases.

WVMDA: Predicting miRNA-Disease Association Based on Weighted Voting

An increasing number of experiments had verified that miRNA expression is related to human diseases. The miRNA expression profile may be an indicator of clinical diagnosis and provides a new direction for the prevention and treatment of complex diseases. In this work, we present a weighted voting-based model for predicting miRNA–disease association (WVMDA). To reasonably build a network of similarity, we established credibility similarity based on the reliability of known associations and used it to improve the original incomplete similarity. To eliminate noise interference as much as possible while maintaining more reliable similarity information, we developed a filter. More importantly, to ensure the fairness and efficiency of weighted voting, we focus on the design of weighting. Finally, cross-validation experiments and case studies are undertaken to verify the efficacy of the proposed model. The results showed that WVMDA could efficiently identify miRNAs associated with the disease.

Predicting miRNA-Disease Associations Based on Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks

In recent years, more and more evidence has shown that microRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in the regulation of post-transcriptional gene expression, and are closely related to human diseases. Many studies have also revealed that miRNAs can be served as promising biomarkers for the potential diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. The interactions between miRNA and human disease have rarely been demonstrated, and the underlying mechanism of miRNA is not clear. Therefore, computational approaches has attracted the attention of researchers, which can not only save time and money, but also improve the efficiency and accuracy of biological experiments. In this work, we proposed a Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks (GAT) based method for miRNA-disease associations prediction, named HGATMDA. We constructed a heterogeneous graph for miRNAs and diseases, introduced weighted DeepWalk and GAT methods to extract features of miRNAs and diseases from the graph. Moreover, a fully-connected neural networks is used to predict correlation scores between miRNA-disease pairs. Experimental results under five-fold cross validation (five-fold CV) showed that HGATMDA achieved better prediction performance than other state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we performed three case studies on breast neoplasms, lung neoplasms and kidney neoplasms. The results showed that for the three diseases mentioned above, 50 out of top 50 candidates were confirmed by the validation datasets. Therefore, HGATMDA is suitable as an effective tool to identity potential diseases-related miRNAs.

MDA-GCNFTG: identifying miRNA-disease associations based on graph convolutional networks via graph sampling through the feature and topology graph

Accurate identification of the miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) helps to understand the etiology and mechanisms of various diseases. However, the experimental methods are costly and time-consuming. Thus, it is urgent to develop computational methods towards the prediction of MDAs. Based on the graph theory, the MDA prediction is regarded as a node classification task in the present study. To solve this task, we propose a novel method MDA-GCNFTG, which predicts MDAs based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) via graph sampling through the Feature and Topology Graph to improve the training efficiency and accuracy. This method models both the potential connections of feature space and the structural relationships of MDA data. The nodes of the graphs are represented by the disease semantic similarity, miRNA functional similarity and Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity. Moreover, we considered six tasks simultaneously on the MDA prediction problem at the first time, which ensure that under both balanced and unbalanced sample distribution, MDA-GCNFTG can predict not only new MDAs but also new diseases without known related miRNAs and new miRNAs without known related diseases. The results of 5-fold cross-validation show that the MDA-GCNFTG method has achieved satisfactory performance on all six tasks and is significantly superior to the classic machine learning methods and the state-of-the-art MDA prediction methods. Moreover, the effectiveness of GCNs via the graph sampling strategy and the feature and topology graph in MDA-GCNFTG has also been demonstrated. More importantly, case studies for two diseases and three miRNAs are conducted and achieved satisfactory performance.

NMCMDA: neural multicategory MiRNA-disease association prediction

MOTIVATION

There is growing evidence showing that the dysregulations of miRNAs cause diseases through various kinds of the underlying mechanism. Thus, predicting the multiple-category associations between microRNAs (miRNAs) and diseases plays an important role in investigating the roles of miRNAs in diseases. Moreover, in contrast with traditional biological experiments which are time-consuming and expensive, computational approaches for the prediction of multicategory miRNA-disease associations are time-saving and cost-effective that are highly desired for us.

RESULTS

We present a novel data-driven end-to-end learning-based method of neural multiple-category miRNA-disease association prediction (NMCMDA) for predicting multiple-category miRNA-disease associations. The NMCMDA has two main components: (i) encoder operates directly on the miRNA-disease heterogeneous network and leverages Graph Neural Network to learn miRNA and disease latent representations, respectively. (ii) Decoder yields miRNA-disease association scores with the learned latent representations as input. Various kinds of encoders and decoders are proposed for NMCMDA. Finally, the NMCMDA with the encoder of Relational Graph Convolutional Network and the neural multirelational decoder (NMR-RGCN) achieves the best prediction performance. We compared the NMCMDA with other baselines on three experimental datasets. The experimental results show that the NMR-RGCN is significantly superior to the state-of-the-art method TDRC in terms of Top-1 precision, Top-1 Recall, and Top-1 F1. Additionally, case studies are provided for two high-risk human diseases (namely, breast cancer and lung cancer) and we also provide the prediction and validation of top-10 miRNA-disease-category associations based on all known data of HMDD v3.2, which further validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.