HOPEXGB: A Consensual Model for Predicting miRNA/lncRNA-Disease Associations Using a Heterogeneous Disease-miRNA-lncRNA Information Network

Predicting lncRNA-Disease Associations Based on a Dual-Path Feature Extraction Network with Multiple Sources of Information Integration

Identifying the associations between long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and disease is critical for disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. However, conducting wet experiments to discover these associations is time-consuming and costly. Therefore, computational modeling for predicting lncRNA-disease associations (LDAs) has become an important alternative. To enhance the accuracy of LDAs prediction and alleviate the issue of node feature oversmoothing when exploring the potential features of nodes using graph neural networks, we introduce DPFELDA, a dual-path feature extraction network that leverages the integration of information from multiple sources to predict LDA. Initially, we establish a dual-view structure of lncRNAs and disease and a heterogeneous network of lncRNA-disease-microRNA (miRNA) interactions. Subsequently, features are extracted using a dual-path feature extraction network. In particular, we employ a combination of a graph convolutional network, a convolutional block attention module, and a node aggregation layer to perform multilayer topology feature extraction for the dual-view structure of lncRNAs and diseases. Additionally, we utilize a Transformer model to construct the node topology feature residual network for obtaining node-specific features in heterogeneous networks. Finally, XGBoost is employed for LDA prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that DPFELDA outperforms the benchmark model on various benchmark data sets. In the course of model exploration, it becomes evident that DPFELDA successfully alleviates the issue of node feature oversmoothing induced by graph-based learning. Ablation experiments confirm the effectiveness of the innovative module, and a case study substantiates the accuracy of DPFELDA model in predicting novel LDAs for characteristic diseases.

Neighborhood based computational approaches for the prediction of lncRNA-disease associations

MOTIVATION

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a class of molecules involved in important biological processes. Extensive efforts have been provided to get deeper understanding of disease mechanisms at the lncRNA level, guiding towards the detection of biomarkers for disease diagnosis, treatment, prognosis and prevention. Unfortunately, due to costs and time complexity, the number of possible disease-related lncRNAs verified by traditional biological experiments is very limited. Computational approaches for the prediction of disease-lncRNA associations allow to identify the most promising candidates to be verified in laboratory, reducing costs and time consuming.

RESULTS

We propose novel approaches for the prediction of lncRNA-disease associations, all sharing the idea of exploring associations among lncRNAs, other intermediate molecules (e.g., miRNAs) and diseases, suitably represented by tripartite graphs. Indeed, while only a few lncRNA-disease associations are still known, plenty of interactions between lncRNAs and other molecules, as well as associations of the latters with diseases, are available. A first approach presented here, NGH, relies on neighborhood analysis performed on a tripartite graph, built upon lncRNAs, miRNAs and diseases. A second approach (CF) relies on collaborative filtering; a third approach (NGH-CF) is obtained boosting NGH by collaborative filtering. The proposed approaches have been validated on both synthetic and real data, and compared against other methods from the literature. It results that neighborhood analysis allows to outperform competitors, and when it is combined with collaborative filtering the prediction accuracy further improves, scoring a value of AUC equal to 0966.

AVAILABILITY

Source code and sample datasets are available at: https://github.com/marybonomo/LDAsPredictionApproaches.git.

Predicting lncRNA-disease associations using multiple metapaths in hierarchical graph attention networks

BACKGROUND

Many biological studies have shown that lncRNAs regulate the expression of epigenetically related genes. The study of lncRNAs has helped to deepen our understanding of the pathogenesis of complex diseases at the molecular level. Due to the large number of lncRNAs and the complex and time-consuming nature of biological experiments, applying computer techniques to predict potential lncRNA-disease associations is very effective. To explore information between complex network structures, existing methods rely mainly on lncRNA and disease information. Metapaths have been applied to network models as an effective method for exploring information in heterogeneous graphs. However, existing methods are dominated by lncRNAs or disease nodes and tend to ignore the paths provided by intermediate nodes.

METHODS

We propose a deep learning model based on hierarchical graphical attention networks to predict unknown lncRNA-disease associations using multiple types of metapaths to extract features. We have named this model the MMHGAN. First, the model constructs a lncRNA-disease-miRNA heterogeneous graph based on known associations and two homogeneous graphs of lncRNAs and diseases. Second, for homogeneous graphs, the features of neighboring nodes are aggregated using a multihead attention mechanism. Third, for the heterogeneous graph, metapaths of different intermediate nodes are selected to construct subgraphs, and the importance of different types of metapaths is calculated and aggregated to obtain the final embedded features. Finally, the features are reconstructed using a fully connected layer to obtain the prediction results.

RESULTS

We used a fivefold cross-validation method and obtained an average AUC value of 96.07% and an average AUPR value of 93.23%. Additionally, ablation experiments demonstrated the role of homogeneous graphs and different intermediate node path weights. In addition, we studied lung cancer, esophageal carcinoma, and breast cancer. Among the 15 lncRNAs associated with these diseases, 15, 12, and 14 lncRNAs were validated by the lncRNA Disease Database and the Lnc2Cancer Database, respectively.

CONCLUSION

We compared the MMHGAN model with six existing models with better performance, and the case study demonstrated that the model was effective in predicting the correlation between potential lncRNAs and diseases.

Applying negative sample denoising and multi-view feature for lncRNA-disease association prediction

Increasing evidence indicates that mutations and dysregulation of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) play a crucial role in the pathogenesis and prognosis of complex human diseases. Computational methods for predicting the association between lncRNAs and diseases have gained increasing attention. However, these methods face two key challenges: obtaining reliable negative samples and incorporating lncRNA-disease association (LDA) information from multiple perspectives. This paper proposes a method called NDMLDA, which combines multi-view feature extraction, unsupervised negative sample denoising, and stacking ensemble classifier. Firstly, an unsupervised method (K-means) is used to design a negative sample denoising module to alleviate the imbalance of samples and the impact of potential noise in the negative samples on model performance. Secondly, graph attention networks are employed to extract multi-view features of both lncRNAs and diseases, thereby enhancing the learning of association information between them. Finally, lncRNA-disease association prediction is implemented through a stacking ensemble classifier. Existing research datasets are integrated to evaluate performance, and 5-fold cross-validation is conducted on this dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that NDMLDA achieves an AUC of 0.9907and an AUPR of 0.9927, with a 5-fold cross-validation variance of less than 0.1%. These results outperform the baseline methods. Additionally, case studies further illustrate the model's potential in cancer diagnosis and precision medicine implementation.