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Han Y, Zhou Q, Liu L, Li J, Zhou Y. DNI-MDCAP: improvement of causal MiRNA-disease association prediction based on deep network imputation. BMC Bioinformatics 2024; 25:22. [PMID: 38216907 PMCID: PMC10785389 DOI: 10.1186/s12859-024-05644-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/07/2023] [Accepted: 01/08/2024] [Indexed: 01/14/2024] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND MiRNAs are involved in the occurrence and development of many diseases. Extensive literature studies have demonstrated that miRNA-disease associations are stratified and encompass ~ 20% causal associations. Computational models that predict causal miRNA-disease associations provide effective guidance in identifying novel interpretations of disease mechanisms and potential therapeutic targets. Although several predictive models for miRNA-disease associations exist, it is still challenging to discriminate causal miRNA-disease associations from non-causal ones. Hence, there is a pressing need to develop an efficient prediction model for causal miRNA-disease association prediction. RESULTS We developed DNI-MDCAP, an improved computational model that incorporated additional miRNA similarity metrics, deep graph embedding learning-based network imputation and semi-supervised learning framework. Through extensive predictive performance evaluation, including tenfold cross-validation and independent test, DNI-MDCAP showed excellent performance in identifying causal miRNA-disease associations, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.896 and 0.889, respectively. Regarding the challenge of discriminating causal miRNA-disease associations from non-causal ones, DNI-MDCAP exhibited superior predictive performance compared to existing models MDCAP and LE-MDCAP, reaching an AUROC of 0.870. Wilcoxon test also indicated significantly higher prediction scores for causal associations than for non-causal ones. Finally, the potential causal miRNA-disease associations predicted by DNI-MDCAP, exemplified by diabetic nephropathies and hsa-miR-193a, have been validated by recently published literature, further supporting the reliability of the prediction model. CONCLUSIONS DNI-MDCAP is a dedicated tool to specifically distinguish causal miRNA-disease associations with substantially improved accuracy. DNI-MDCAP is freely accessible at http://www.rnanut.net/DNIMDCAP/ .
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Affiliation(s)
- Yu Han
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
| | - Qiong Zhou
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
| | - Leibo Liu
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
| | - Jianwei Li
- Institute of Computational Medicine, School of Artificial Intelligence, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China
| | - Yuan Zhou
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China.
- State Key Laboratory of Vascular Homeostasis and Remodeling, Peking University, Beijing, China.
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Mao G, Pang Z, Zuo K, Wang Q, Pei X, Chen X, Liu J. Predicting gene regulatory links from single-cell RNA-seq data using graph neural networks. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:bbad414. [PMID: 37985457 PMCID: PMC10661972 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad414] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/03/2023] [Revised: 10/25/2023] [Accepted: 10/26/2023] [Indexed: 11/22/2023] Open
Abstract
Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) has emerged as a powerful technique for studying gene expression patterns at the single-cell level. Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from scRNA-seq data provides insight into cellular phenotypes from the genomic level. However, the high sparsity, noise and dropout events inherent in scRNA-seq data present challenges for GRN inference. In recent years, the dramatic increase in data on experimentally validated transcription factors binding to DNA has made it possible to infer GRNs by supervised methods. In this study, we address the problem of GRN inference by framing it as a graph link prediction task. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called GNNLink, which leverages known GRNs to deduce the potential regulatory interdependencies between genes. First, we preprocess the raw scRNA-seq data. Then, we introduce a graph convolutional network-based interaction graph encoder to effectively refine gene features by capturing interdependencies between nodes in the network. Finally, the inference of GRN is obtained by performing matrix completion operation on node features. The features obtained from model training can be applied to downstream tasks such as measuring similarity and inferring causality between gene pairs. To evaluate the performance of GNNLink, we compare it with six existing GRN reconstruction methods using seven scRNA-seq datasets. These datasets encompass diverse ground truth networks, including functional interaction networks, Loss of Function/Gain of Function data, non-specific ChIP-seq data and cell-type-specific ChIP-seq data. Our experimental results demonstrate that GNNLink achieves comparable or superior performance across these datasets, showcasing its robustness and accuracy. Furthermore, we observe consistent performance across datasets of varying scales. For reproducibility, we provide the data and source code of GNNLink on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/sdesignates/GNNLink.
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Affiliation(s)
- Guo Mao
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Zhengbin Pang
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Ke Zuo
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Qinglin Wang
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Xiangdong Pei
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Xinhai Chen
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
| | - Jie Liu
- Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
- Laboratory of Software Engineering for Complex System, National University of Defense Technology, deya, 410073 Changsha, China
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Shi Y, Wan J, Zhang X, Yin Y. CL-Impute: A contrastive learning-based imputation for dropout single-cell RNA-seq data. Comput Biol Med 2023; 164:107263. [PMID: 37531858 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107263] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/09/2023] [Revised: 06/27/2023] [Accepted: 07/16/2023] [Indexed: 08/04/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology has revolutionized the study of cell heterogeneity and biological interpretation at the single-cell level. However, the dropout events commonly present in scRNA-seq data can markedly reduce the reliability of downstream analysis. Existing imputation methods often overlook the discrepancy between the established cell relationship from dropout noisy data and reality, which limits their performances due to the learned untrustworthy cell representations. METHOD Here, we propose a novel approach called the CL-Impute (Contrastive Learning-based Impute) model for estimating missing genes without relying on preconstructed cell relationships. CL-Impute utilizes contrastive learning and a self-attention network to address this challenge. Specifically, the proposed CL-Impute model leverages contrastive learning to learn cell representations from the self-perspective of dropout events, whereas the self-attention network captures cell relationships from the global-perspective. RESULTS Experimental results on four benchmark datasets, including quantitative assessment, cell clustering, gene identification, and trajectory inference, demonstrate the superior performance of CL-Impute compared with that of existing state-of-the-art imputation methods. Furthermore, our experiment reveals that combining contrastive learning and masking cell augmentation enables the model to learn actual latent features from noisy data with a high rate of dropout events, enhancing the reliability of imputed values. CONCLUSIONS CL-Impute is a novel contrastive learning-based method to impute scRNA-seq data in the context of high dropout rate. The source code of CL-Impute is available at https://github.com/yuchen21-web/Imputation-for-scRNA-seq.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yuchen Shi
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, 310018, China; Key Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation Ministry of Education, Ministry of Education, China
| | - Jian Wan
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, 310018, China; School of Information and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, 310023, China
| | - Xin Zhang
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, 310018, China; Key Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation Ministry of Education, Ministry of Education, China.
| | - Yuyu Yin
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, 310018, China; Key Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation Ministry of Education, Ministry of Education, China.
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Pandey D, Onkara PP. Improved downstream functional analysis of single-cell RNA-sequence data using DGAN. Sci Rep 2023; 13:1618. [PMID: 36709340 PMCID: PMC9884242 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-28952-y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/10/2022] [Accepted: 01/27/2023] [Indexed: 01/29/2023] Open
Abstract
The dramatic increase in the number of single-cell RNA-sequence (scRNA-seq) investigations is indeed an endorsement of the new-fangled proficiencies of next generation sequencing technologies that facilitate the accurate measurement of tens of thousands of RNA expression levels at the cellular resolution. Nevertheless, missing values of RNA amplification persist and remain as a significant computational challenge, as these data omission induce further noise in their respective cellular data and ultimately impede downstream functional analysis of scRNA-seq data. Consequently, it turns imperative to develop robust and efficient scRNA-seq data imputation methods for improved downstream functional analysis outcomes. To overcome this adversity, we have designed an imputation framework namely deep generative autoencoder network [DGAN]. In essence, DGAN is an evolved variational autoencoder designed to robustly impute data dropouts in scRNA-seq data manifested as a sparse gene expression matrix. DGAN principally reckons count distribution, besides data sparsity utilizing a gaussian model whereby, cell dependencies are capitalized to detect and exclude outlier cells via imputation. When tested on five publicly available scRNA-seq data, DGAN outperformed every single baseline method paralleled, with respect to downstream functional analysis including cell data visualization, clustering, classification and differential expression analysis. DGAN is executed in Python and is accessible at https://github.com/dikshap11/DGAN .
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Affiliation(s)
- Diksha Pandey
- Department of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India
| | - Perumal P Onkara
- Department of Biotechnology, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India.
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Qi Y, Han S, Tang L, Liu L. Imputation method for single-cell RNA-seq data using neural topic model. Gigascience 2022; 12:giad098. [PMID: 38000911 PMCID: PMC10673642 DOI: 10.1093/gigascience/giad098] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/30/2023] [Revised: 09/02/2023] [Accepted: 10/23/2023] [Indexed: 11/26/2023] Open
Abstract
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology studies transcriptome and cell-to-cell differences from higher single-cell resolution and different perspectives. Despite the advantage of high capture efficiency, downstream functional analysis of scRNA-seq data is made difficult by the excess of zero values (i.e., the dropout phenomenon). To effectively address this problem, we introduced scNTImpute, an imputation framework based on a neural topic model. A neural network encoder is used to extract underlying topic features of single-cell transcriptome data to infer high-quality cell similarity. At the same time, we determine which transcriptome data are affected by the dropout phenomenon according to the learning of the mixture model by the neural network. On the basis of stable cell similarity, the same gene information in other similar cells is borrowed to impute only the missing expression values. By evaluating the performance of real data, scNTImpute can accurately and efficiently identify the dropout values and imputes them accurately. In the meantime, the clustering of cell subsets is improved and the original biological information in cell clustering is solved, which is covered by technical noise. The source code for the scNTImpute module is available as open source at https://github.com/qiyueyang-7/scNTImpute.git.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yueyang Qi
- Yunnan Normal University, School of Information, Kunming 650500, China
| | - Shuangkai Han
- Yunnan Normal University, School of Information, Kunming 650500, China
| | - Lin Tang
- Yunnan Normal University, Faculty of Education, Kunming 650500, China
| | - Lin Liu
- Yunnan Normal University, School of Information, Kunming 650500, China
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