Prediction of microRNAs associated with human diseases based on weighted k most similar neighbors

SPLHRNMTF: robust orthogonal non-negative matrix tri-factorization with self-paced learning and dual hypergraph regularization for predicting miRNA-disease associations

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been demonstrated to be closely related to human diseases. Studying the potential associations between miRNAs and diseases contributes to our understanding of disease pathogenic mechanisms. As traditional biological experiments are costly and time-consuming, computational models can be considered as effective complementary tools. In this study, we propose a novel model of robust orthogonal non-negative matrix tri-factorization (NMTF) with self-paced learning and dual hypergraph regularization, named SPLHRNMTF, to predict miRNA-disease associations. More specifically, SPLHRNMTF first uses a non-linear fusion method to obtain miRNA and disease comprehensive similarity. Subsequently, the improved miRNA-disease association matrix is reformulated based on weighted k-nearest neighbor profiles to correct false-negative associations. In addition, we utilize L 2 , 1 norm to replace Frobenius norm to calculate residual error, alleviating the impact of noise and outliers on prediction performance. Then, we integrate self-paced learning into NMTF to alleviate the model from falling into bad local optimal solutions by gradually including samples from easy to complex. Finally, hypergraph regularization is introduced to capture high-order complex relations from hypergraphs related to miRNAs and diseases. In 5-fold cross-validation five times experiments, SPLHRNMTF obtains higher average AUC values than other baseline models. Moreover, the case studies on breast neoplasms and lung neoplasms further demonstrate the accuracy of SPLHRNMTF. Meanwhile, the potential associations discovered are of biological significance.

TriFusion enables accurate prediction of miRNA-disease association by a tri-channel fusion neural network

The identification of miRNA-disease associations is crucial for early disease prevention and treatment. However, it is still a computational challenge to accurately predict such associations due to improper information encoding. Previous methods characterize miRNA-disease associations only from single levels, causing the loss of multi-level association information. In this study, we propose TriFusion, a powerful and interpretable deep learning framework for miRNA-disease association prediction. It develops a tri-channel architecture to encode the association features of miRNAs and diseases from different levels and designs a feature fusion encoder to smoothly fuse these features. After training and testing, TriFusion outperforms other leading methods and offers strong interpretability through its learned representations. Furthermore, TriFusion is applied to three high-risk sexually associated cancers (ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers) and exhibits remarkable ability in the identification of miRNAs associated with the three diseases.

HHOMR: a hybrid high-order moment residual model for miRNA-disease association prediction

Numerous studies have demonstrated that microRNAs (miRNAs) are critically important for the prediction, diagnosis, and characterization of diseases. However, identifying miRNA-disease associations through traditional biological experiments is both costly and time-consuming. To further explore these associations, we proposed a model based on hybrid high-order moments combined with element-level attention mechanisms (HHOMR). This model innovatively fused hybrid higher-order statistical information along with structural and community information. Specifically, we first constructed a heterogeneous graph based on existing associations between miRNAs and diseases. HHOMR employs a structural fusion layer to capture structure-level embeddings and leverages a hybrid high-order moments encoder layer to enhance features. Element-level attention mechanisms are then used to adaptively integrate the features of these hybrid moments. Finally, a multi-layer perceptron is utilized to calculate the association scores between miRNAs and diseases. Through five-fold cross-validation on HMDD v2.0, we achieved a mean AUC of 93.28%. Compared with four state-of-the-art models, HHOMR exhibited superior performance. Additionally, case studies on three diseases-esophageal neoplasms, lymphoma, and prostate neoplasms-were conducted. Among the top 50 miRNAs with high disease association scores, 46, 47, and 45 associated with these diseases were confirmed by the dbDEMC and miR2Disease databases, respectively. Our results demonstrate that HHOMR not only outperforms existing models but also shows significant potential in predicting miRNA-disease associations.

THGNCDA: circRNA-disease association prediction based on triple heterogeneous graph network

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a class of noncoding RNA molecules featuring a closed circular structure. They have been proved to play a significant role in the reduction of many diseases. Besides, many researches in clinical diagnosis and treatment of disease have revealed that circRNA can be considered as a potential biomarker. Therefore, understanding the association of circRNA and diseases can help to forecast some disorders of life activities. However, traditional biological experimental methods are time-consuming. The most common method for circRNA-disease association prediction on the basis of machine learning can avoid this, which relies on diverse data. Nevertheless, topological information of circRNA and disease usually is not involved in these methods. Moreover, circRNAs can be associated with diseases through miRNAs. With these considerations, we proposed a novel method, named THGNCDA, to predict the association between circRNAs and diseases. Specifically, for a certain pair of circRNA and disease, we employ a graph neural network with attention to learn the importance of its each neighbor. In addition, we use a multilayer convolutional neural network to explore the relationship of a circRNA-disease pair based on their attributes. When calculating embeddings, we introduce the information of miRNAs. The results of experiments show that THGNCDA outperformed the SOTA methods. In addition, it can be observed that our method gives a better recall rate. To confirm the significance of attention, we conducted extensive ablation studies. Case studies on Urinary Bladder and Prostatic Neoplasms further show THGNCDA's ability in discovering known relationships between circRNA candidates and diseases.

Three-layer heterogeneous network based on the integration of CircRNA information for MiRNA-disease association prediction

Increasing research has shown that the abnormal expression of microRNA (miRNA) is associated with many complex diseases. However, biological experiments have many limitations in identifying the potential disease-miRNA associations. Therefore, we developed a computational model of Three-Layer Heterogeneous Network based on the Integration of CircRNA information for MiRNA-Disease Association prediction (TLHNICMDA). In the model, a disease-miRNA-circRNA heterogeneous network is built by known disease-miRNA associations, known miRNA-circRNA interactions, disease similarity, miRNA similarity, and circRNA similarity. Then, the potential disease-miRNA associations are identified by an update algorithm based on the global network. Finally, based on global and local leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV), the values of AUCs in TLHNICMDA are 0.8795 and 0.7774. Moreover, the mean and standard deviation of AUC in 5-fold cross-validations is 0.8777+/-0.0010. Especially, the two types of case studies illustrated the usefulness of TLHNICMDA in predicting disease-miRNA interactions.

Predicting miRNA-Disease Associations by Combining Graph and Hypergraph Convolutional Network

miRNAs are important regulators for many crucial biological processes. Many recent studies have shown that miRNAs are closely related to various human diseases and can be potential biomarkers or therapeutic targets for some diseases, such as cancers. Therefore, accurately predicting miRNA-disease associations is of great importance for understanding and curing diseases. However, how to efficiently utilize the characteristics of miRNAs and diseases and the information on known miRNA-disease associations for prediction is still not fully explored. In this study, we propose a novel computational method for predicting miRNA-disease associations. The proposed method combines the graph convolutional network and the hypergraph convolutional network. The graph convolutional network is utilized to extract the information from miRNA-similarity data as well as disease-similarity data. Based on the representations of miRNAs and diseases learned by the graph convolutional network, we further use the hypergraph convolutional network to capture the complex high-order interactions in the known miRNA-disease associations. We conduct comprehensive experiments with different datasets and predictive tasks. The results show that the proposed method consistently outperforms several other state-of-the-art methods. We also discuss the influence of hyper-parameters and model structures on the performance of our method. Some case studies also demonstrate that the predictive results of the method can be verified by independent experiments.

DGAMDA: Predicting miRNA-disease association based on dynamic graph attention network

MiRNA (microRNA)-disease association prediction has essential applications for early disease screening. The process of traditional biological experimental validation is both time-consuming and expensive. However, as artificial intelligence technology continues to advance, computational methods have become efficient tools for predicting miRNA-disease associations. These methods often rely on the combination of multiple sources of association data and require improved feature mining. This study proposes a dynamic graph attention-based association prediction model, DGAMDA, which combines feature mapping and dynamic graph attention mechanisms through feature mining on a single miRNA-disease association network. DGAMDA effectively solves the problems of feature heterogeneity and inadequate feature mining by previous static graph attention mechanisms and achieves high-precision feature mining and association scoring prediction. We conducted a five-fold cross-validation experiment and obtained the mean values of Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-score, which were .8986, .8869, .9115, and .8984, respectively. Our proposed model outperforms other advanced models in terms of experimental results, demonstrating its effectiveness in feature mining and association prediction based on a single association network. In addition, our model can also be used to predict miRNAs associated with unknown diseases.

SCPLPA: An miRNA-disease association prediction model based on spatial consistency projection and label propagation algorithm

Identifying the association between miRNA and diseases is helpful for disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. It is of great significance to use computational methods to predict potential human miRNA disease associations. Considering the shortcomings of existing computational methods, such as low prediction accuracy and weak generalization, we propose a new method called SCPLPA to predict miRNA-disease associations. First, a heterogeneous disease similarity network was constructed using the disease semantic similarity network and the disease Gaussian interaction spectrum kernel similarity network, while a heterogeneous miRNA similarity network was constructed using the miRNA functional similarity network and the miRNA Gaussian interaction spectrum kernel similarity network. Then, the estimated miRNA-disease association scores were evaluated by integrating the outcomes obtained by implementing label propagation algorithms in the heterogeneous disease similarity network and the heterogeneous miRNA similarity network. Finally, the spatial consistency projection algorithm of the network was used to extract miRNA disease association features to predict unverified associations between miRNA and diseases. SCPLPA was compared with four classical methods (MDHGI, NSEMDA, RFMDA and SNMFMDA), and the results of multiple evaluation metrics showed that SCPLPA exhibited the most outstanding predictive performance. Case studies have shown that SCPLPA can effectively identify miRNAs associated with colon neoplasms and kidney neoplasms. In summary, our proposed SCPLPA algorithm is easy to implement and can effectively predict miRNA disease associations, making it a reliable auxiliary tool for biomedical research.

MHIF-MSEA: a novel model of miRNA set enrichment analysis based on multi-source heterogeneous information fusion

Introduction: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of non-coding RNA molecules that play a crucial role in the regulation of diverse biological processes across various organisms. Despite not encoding proteins, miRNAs have been found to have significant implications in the onset and progression of complex human diseases. Methods: Conventional methods for miRNA functional enrichment analysis have certain limitations, and we proposed a novel method called MiRNA Set Enrichment Analysis based on Multi-source Heterogeneous Information Fusion (MHIF-MSEA). Three miRNA similarity networks (miRSN-DA, miRSN-GOA, and miRSN-PPI) were constructed in MHIF-MSEA. These networks were built based on miRNA-disease association, gene ontology (GO) annotation of target genes, and protein-protein interaction of target genes, respectively. These miRNA similarity networks were fused into a single similarity network with the averaging method. This fused network served as the input for the random walk with restart algorithm, which expanded the original miRNA list. Finally, MHIF-MSEA performed enrichment analysis on the expanded list. Results and Discussion: To determine the optimal network fusion approach, three case studies were introduced: colon cancer, breast cancer, and hepatocellular carcinoma. The experimental results revealed that the miRNA-miRNA association network constructed using miRSN-DA and miRSN-GOA exhibited superior performance as the input network. Furthermore, the MHIF-MSEA model performed enrichment analysis on differentially expressed miRNAs in breast cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma. The achieved p-values were 2.17e(-75) and 1.50e(-77), and the hit rates improved by 39.01% and 44.68% compared to traditional enrichment analysis methods, respectively. These results confirm that the MHIF-MSEA method enhances the identification of enriched miRNA sets by leveraging multiple sources of heterogeneous information, leading to improved insights into the functional implications of miRNAs in complex diseases.

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.

ReHoGCNES-MDA: prediction of miRNA-disease associations using homogenous graph convolutional networks based on regular graph with random edge sampler

Numerous investigations increasingly indicate the significance of microRNA (miRNA) in human diseases. Hence, unearthing associations between miRNA and diseases can contribute to precise diagnosis and efficacious remediation of medical conditions. The detection of miRNA-disease linkages via computational techniques utilizing biological information has emerged as a cost-effective and highly efficient approach. Here, we introduced a computational framework named ReHoGCNES, designed for prospective miRNA-disease association prediction (ReHoGCNES-MDA). This method constructs homogenous graph convolutional network with regular graph structure (ReHoGCN) encompassing disease similarity network, miRNA similarity network and known MDA network and then was tested on four experimental tasks. A random edge sampler strategy was utilized to expedite processes and diminish training complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ReHoGCNES-MDA method outperforms both homogenous graph convolutional network and heterogeneous graph convolutional network with non-regular graph structure in all four tasks, which implicitly reveals steadily degree distribution of a graph does play an important role in enhancement of model performance. Besides, ReHoGCNES-MDA is superior to several machine learning algorithms and state-of-the-art methods on the MDA prediction. Furthermore, three case studies were conducted to further demonstrate the predictive ability of ReHoGCNES. Consequently, 93.3% (breast neoplasms), 90% (prostate neoplasms) and 93.3% (prostate neoplasms) of the top 30 forecasted miRNAs were validated by public databases. Hence, ReHoGCNES-MDA might serve as a dependable and beneficial model for predicting possible MDAs.

Node-adaptive graph Transformer with structural encoding for accurate and robust lncRNA-disease association prediction

BACKGROUND

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are integral to a plethora of critical cellular biological processes, including the regulation of gene expression, cell differentiation, and the development of tumors and cancers. Predicting the relationships between lncRNAs and diseases can contribute to a better understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms of disease and provide strong support for the development of advanced treatment methods.

RESULTS

Therefore, we present an innovative Node-Adaptive Graph Transformer model for predicting unknown LncRNA-Disease Associations, named NAGTLDA. First, we utilize the node-adaptive feature smoothing (NAFS) method to learn the local feature information of nodes and encode the structural information of the fusion similarity network of diseases and lncRNAs using Structural Deep Network Embedding (SDNE). Next, the Transformer module is used to capture potential association information between the network nodes. Finally, we employ a Transformer module with two multi-headed attention layers for learning global-level embedding fusion. Network structure coding is added as the structural inductive bias of the network to compensate for the missing message-passing mechanism in Transformer. NAGTLDA achieved an average AUC of 0.9531 and AUPR of 0.9537 significantly higher than state-of-the-art methods in 5-fold cross validation. We perform case studies on 4 diseases; 55 out of 60 associations between lncRNAs and diseases have been validated in the literatures. The results demonstrate the enormous potential of the graph Transformer structure to incorporate graph structural information for uncovering lncRNA-disease unknown correlations.

CONCLUSIONS

Our proposed NAGTLDA model can serve as a highly efficient computational method for predicting biological information associations.

A Multi-Relational Graph Encoder Network for Fine-Grained Prediction of MiRNA-Disease Associations

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are critical in diagnosing and treating various diseases. Automatically demystifying the interdependent relationships between miRNAs and diseases has recently made remarkable progress, but their fine-grained interactive relationships still need to be explored. We propose a multi-relational graph encoder network for fine-grained prediction of miRNA-disease associations (MRFGMDA), which uses practical and current datasets to construct a multi-relational graph encoder network to predict disease-related miRNAs and their specific relationship types (upregulation, downregulation, or dysregulation). We evaluated MRFGMDA and found that it accurately predicted miRNA-disease associations, which could have far-reaching implications for clinical medical analysis, early diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. Case analyses, Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, expression difference analysis, and immune infiltration analysis further demonstrated the effectiveness and feasibility of MRFGMDA in uncovering potential disease-related miRNAs. Overall, our work represents a significant step toward improving the prediction of miRNA-disease associations using a fine-grained approach could lead to more accurate diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

Predicting potential microbe-disease associations based on auto-encoder and graph convolution network

The increasing body of research has consistently demonstrated the intricate correlation between the human microbiome and human well-being. Microbes can impact the efficacy and toxicity of drugs through various pathways, as well as influence the occurrence and metastasis of tumors. In clinical practice, it is crucial to elucidate the association between microbes and diseases. Although traditional biological experiments accurately identify this association, they are time-consuming, expensive, and susceptible to experimental conditions. Consequently, conducting extensive biological experiments to screen potential microbe-disease associations becomes challenging. The computational methods can solve the above problems well, but the previous computational methods still have the problems of low utilization of node features and the prediction accuracy needs to be improved. To address this issue, we propose the DAEGCNDF model predicting potential associations between microbes and diseases. Our model calculates four similar features for each microbe and disease. These features are fused to obtain a comprehensive feature matrix representing microbes and diseases. Our model first uses the graph convolutional network module to extract low-rank features with graph information of microbes and diseases, and then uses a deep sparse Auto-Encoder to extract high-rank features of microbe-disease pairs, after which the low-rank and high-rank features are spliced to improve the utilization of node features. Finally, Deep Forest was used for microbe-disease potential relationship prediction. The experimental results show that combining low-rank and high-rank features helps to improve the model performance and Deep Forest has better classification performance than the baseline model.

Adaptive deep propagation graph neural network for predicting miRNA-disease associations

BACKGROUND

A large number of experiments show that the abnormal expression of miRNA is closely related to the occurrence, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Identifying associations between miRNAs and diseases is important for clinical applications of complex human diseases. However, traditional biological experimental methods and calculation-based methods have many limitations, which lead to the development of more efficient and accurate deep learning methods for predicting miRNA-disease associations.

RESULTS

In this paper, we propose a novel model on the basis of adaptive deep propagation graph neural network to predict miRNA-disease associations (ADPMDA). We first construct the miRNA-disease heterogeneous graph based on known miRNA-disease pairs, miRNA integrated similarity information, miRNA sequence information and disease similarity information. Then, we project the features of miRNAs and diseases into a low-dimensional space. After that, attention mechanism is utilized to aggregate the local features of central nodes. In particular, an adaptive deep propagation graph neural network is employed to learn the embedding of nodes, which can adaptively adjust the local and global information of nodes. Finally, the multi-layer perceptron is leveraged to score miRNA-disease pairs.

CONCLUSION

Experiments on human microRNA disease database v3.0 dataset show that ADPMDA achieves the mean AUC value of 94.75% under 5-fold cross-validation. We further conduct case studies on the esophageal neoplasm, lung neoplasms and lymphoma to confirm the effectiveness of our proposed model, and 49, 49, 47 of the top 50 predicted miRNAs associated with these diseases are confirmed, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model in predicting miRNA-disease associations.

Generative Adversarial Matrix Completion Network based on Multi-Source Data Fusion for miRNA-Disease Associations Prediction

Numerous biological studies have shown that considering disease-associated micro RNAs (miRNAs) as potential biomarkers or therapeutic targets offers new avenues for the diagnosis of complex diseases. Computational methods have gradually been introduced to reveal disease-related miRNAs. Considering that previous models have not fused sufficiently diverse similarities, that their inappropriate fusion methods may lead to poor quality of the comprehensive similarity network and that their results are often limited by insufficiently known associations, we propose a computational model called Generative Adversarial Matrix Completion Network based on Multi-source Data Fusion (GAMCNMDF) for miRNA-disease association prediction. We create a diverse network connecting miRNAs and diseases, which is then represented using a matrix. The main task of GAMCNMDF is to complete the matrix and obtain the predicted results. The main innovations of GAMCNMDF are reflected in two aspects: GAMCNMDF integrates diverse data sources and employs a nonlinear fusion approach to update the similarity networks of miRNAs and diseases. Also, some additional information is provided to GAMCNMDF in the form of a 'hint' so that GAMCNMDF can work successfully even when complete data are not available. Compared with other methods, the outcomes of 10-fold cross-validation on two distinct databases validate the superior performance of GAMCNMDF with statistically significant results. It is worth mentioning that we apply GAMCNMDF in the identification of underlying small molecule-related miRNAs, yielding outstanding performance results in this specific domain. In addition, two case studies about two important neoplasms show that GAMCNMDF is a promising prediction method.

iCircDA-NEAE: Accelerated attribute network embedding and dynamic convolutional autoencoder for circRNA-disease associations prediction

Accumulating evidence suggests that circRNAs play crucial roles in human diseases. CircRNA-disease association prediction is extremely helpful in understanding pathogenesis, diagnosis, and prevention, as well as identifying relevant biomarkers. During the past few years, a large number of deep learning (DL) based methods have been proposed for predicting circRNA-disease association and achieved impressive prediction performance. However, there are two main drawbacks to these methods. The first is these methods underutilize biometric information in the data. Second, the features extracted by these methods are not outstanding to represent association characteristics between circRNAs and diseases. In this study, we developed a novel deep learning model, named iCircDA-NEAE, to predict circRNA-disease associations. In particular, we use disease semantic similarity, Gaussian interaction profile kernel, circRNA expression profile similarity, and Jaccard similarity simultaneously for the first time, and extract hidden features based on accelerated attribute network embedding (AANE) and dynamic convolutional autoencoder (DCAE). Experimental results on the circR2Disease dataset show that iCircDA-NEAE outperforms other competing methods significantly. Besides, 16 of the top 20 circRNA-disease pairs with the highest prediction scores were validated by relevant literature. Furthermore, we observe that iCircDA-NEAE can effectively predict new potential circRNA-disease associations.

KATZNCP: a miRNA-disease association prediction model integrating KATZ algorithm and network consistency projection

BACKGROUND

Clinical studies have shown that miRNAs are closely related to human health. The study of potential associations between miRNAs and diseases will contribute to a profound understanding of the mechanism of disease development, as well as human disease prevention and treatment. MiRNA-disease associations predicted by computational methods are the best complement to biological experiments.

RESULTS

In this research, a federated computational model KATZNCP was proposed on the basis of the KATZ algorithm and network consistency projection to infer the potential miRNA-disease associations. In KATZNCP, a heterogeneous network was initially constructed by integrating the known miRNA-disease association, integrated miRNA similarities, and integrated disease similarities; then, the KATZ algorithm was implemented in the heterogeneous network to obtain the estimated miRNA-disease prediction scores. Finally, the precise scores were obtained by the network consistency projection method as the final prediction results. KATZNCP achieved the reliable predictive performance in leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) with an AUC value of 0.9325, which was better than the state-of-the-art comparable algorithms. Furthermore, case studies of lung neoplasms and esophageal neoplasms demonstrated the excellent predictive performance of KATZNCP.

CONCLUSION

A new computational model KATZNCP was proposed for predicting potential miRNA-drug associations based on KATZ and network consistency projections, which can effectively predict the potential miRNA-disease interactions. Therefore, KATZNCP can be used to provide guidance for future experiments.

IMC-MDA: Prediction of miRNA-disease association based on induction matrix completion

To comprehend the etiology and pathogenesis of many illnesses, it is essential to identify disease-associated microRNAs (miRNAs). However, there are a number of challenges with current computational approaches, such as the lack of "negative samples", that is, confirmed irrelevant miRNA-disease pairs, and the poor performance in terms of predicting miRNAs related with "isolated diseases", i.e. illnesses with no known associated miRNAs, which presents the need for novel computational methods. In this study, for the purpose of predicting the connection between disease and miRNA, an inductive matrix completion model was designed, referred to as IMC-MDA. In the model of IMC-MDA, for each miRNA-disease pair, the predicted marks are calculated by combining the known miRNA-disease connection with the integrated disease similarities and miRNA similarities. Based on LOOCV, IMC-MDA had an AUC of 0.8034, which shows better performance than previous methods. Furthermore, experiments have validated the prediction of disease-related miRNAs for three major human diseases: colon cancer, kidney cancer, and lung cancer.

Predicting miRNA-disease associations based on PPMI and attention network

BACKGROUND

With the development of biotechnology and the accumulation of theories, many studies have found that microRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in various diseases. Uncovering the potential associations between miRNAs and diseases is helpful to better understand the pathogenesis of complex diseases. However, traditional biological experiments are expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, it is necessary to develop more efficient computational methods for exploring underlying disease-related miRNAs.

RESULTS

In this paper, we present a new computational method based on positive point-wise mutual information (PPMI) and attention network to predict miRNA-disease associations (MDAs), called PATMDA. Firstly, we construct the heterogeneous MDA network and multiple similarity networks of miRNAs and diseases. Secondly, we respectively perform random walk with restart and PPMI on different similarity network views to get multi-order proximity features and then obtain high-order proximity representations of miRNAs and diseases by applying the convolutional neural network to fuse the learned proximity features. Then, we design an attention network with neural aggregation to integrate the representations of a node and its heterogeneous neighbor nodes according to the MDA network. Finally, an inner product decoder is adopted to calculate the relationship scores between miRNAs and diseases.

CONCLUSIONS

PATMDA achieves superior performance over the six state-of-the-art methods with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.933 and 0.946 on the HMDD v2.0 and HMDD v3.2 datasets, respectively. The case studies further demonstrate the validity of PATMDA for discovering novel disease-associated miRNAs.

Incorporating higher order network structures to improve miRNA-disease association prediction based on functional modularity

As microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in many essential biological processes, their abnormal expressions can serve as biomarkers and prognostic indicators to prevent the development of complex diseases, thus providing accurate early detection and prognostic evaluation. Although a number of computational methods have been proposed to predict miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) for further experimental verification, their performance is limited primarily by the inadequacy of exploiting lower order patterns characterizing known MDAs to identify missing ones from MDA networks. Hence, in this work, we present a novel prediction model, namely HiSCMDA, by incorporating higher order network structures for improved performance of MDA prediction. To this end, HiSCMDA first integrates miRNA similarity network, disease similarity network and MDA network to preserve the advantages of all these networks. After that, it identifies overlapping functional modules from the integrated network by predefining several higher order connectivity patterns of interest. Last, a path-based scoring function is designed to infer potential MDAs based on network paths across related functional modules. HiSCMDA yields the best performance across all datasets and evaluation metrics in the cross-validation and independent validation experiments. Furthermore, in the case studies, 49 and 50 out of the top 50 miRNAs, respectively, predicted for colon neoplasms and lung neoplasms have been validated by well-established databases. Experimental results show that rich higher order organizational structures exposed in the MDA network gain new insight into the MDA prediction based on higher order connectivity patterns.

Prediction of potential small molecule-miRNA associations based on heterogeneous network representation learning

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are closely associated with the occurrences and developments of many complex human diseases. Increasing studies have shown that miRNAs emerge as new therapeutic targets of small molecule (SM) drugs. Since traditional experiment methods are expensive and time consuming, it is particularly crucial to find efficient computational approaches to predict potential small molecule-miRNA (SM-miRNA) associations. Considering that integrating multi-source heterogeneous information related with SM-miRNA association prediction would provide a comprehensive insight into the features of both SMs and miRNAs, we proposed a novel model of Small Molecule-MiRNA Association prediction based on Heterogeneous Network Representation Learning (SMMA-HNRL) for more precisely predicting the potential SM-miRNA associations. In SMMA-HNRL, a novel heterogeneous information network was constructed with SM nodes, miRNA nodes and disease nodes. To access and utilize of the topological information of the heterogeneous information network, feature vectors of SM and miRNA nodes were obtained by two different heterogeneous network representation learning algorithms (HeGAN and HIN2Vec) respectively and merged with connect operation. Finally, LightGBM was chosen as the classifier of SMMA-HNRL for predicting potential SM-miRNA associations. The 10-fold cross validations were conducted to evaluate the prediction performance of SMMA-HNRL, it achieved an area under of ROC curve of 0.9875, which was superior to other three state-of-the-art models. With two independent validation datasets, the test experiment results revealed the robustness of our model. Moreover, three case studies were performed. As a result, 35, 37, and 22 miRNAs among the top 50 predicting miRNAs associated with 5-FU, cisplatin, and imatinib were validated by experimental literature works respectively, which confirmed the effectiveness of SMMA-HNRL. The source code and experimental data of SMMA-HNRL are available at https://github.com/SMMA-HNRL/SMMA-HNRL.

Line graph attention networks for predicting disease-associated Piwi-interacting RNAs

PIWI proteins and Piwi-Interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are commonly detected in human cancers, especially in germline and somatic tissues, and correlate with poorer clinical outcomes, suggesting that they play a functional role in cancer. As the problem of combinatorial explosions between ncRNA and disease exposes gradually, new bioinformatics methods for large-scale identification and prioritization of potential associations are therefore of interest. However, in the real world, the network of interactions between molecules is enormously intricate and noisy, which poses a problem for efficient graph mining. Line graphs can extend many heterogeneous networks to replace dichotomous networks. In this study, we present a new graph neural network framework, line graph attention networks (LGAT). And we apply it to predict PiRNA disease association (GAPDA). In the experiment, GAPDA performs excellently in 5-fold cross-validation with an AUC of 0.9038. Not only that, it still has superior performance compared with methods based on collaborative filtering and attribute features. The experimental results show that GAPDA ensures the prospect of the graph neural network on such problems and can be an excellent supplement for future biomedical research.

BLNIMDA: identifying miRNA-disease associations based on weighted bi-level network

Background

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been confirmed to be inextricably linked to the emergence of human complex diseases. The identification of the disease-related miRNAs has gradually become a routine way to unveil the genetic mechanisms of examined disorders.

Methods

In this study, a method BLNIMDA based on a weighted bi-level network was proposed for predicting hidden associations between miRNAs and diseases. For this purpose, the known associations between miRNAs and diseases as well as integrated similarities between miRNAs and diseases are mapped into a bi-level network. Based on the developed bi-level network, the miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) are defined as strong associations, potential associations and no associations. Then, each miRNA-disease pair (MDP) is assigned two information properties according to the bidirectional information distribution strategy, i.e., associations of miRNA towards disease and vice-versa. Finally, two affinity weights for each MDP obtained from the information properties and the association type are then averaged as the final association score of the MDP. Highlights of the BLNIMDA lie in the definition of MDA types, and the introduction of affinity weights evaluation from the bidirectional information distribution strategy and defined association types, which ensure the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the final prediction score of MDAs.

Results

Five-fold cross-validation and leave-one-out cross-validation are used to evaluate the performance of the BLNIMDA. The results of the Area Under Curve show that the BLNIMDA has many advantages over the other seven selected computational methods. Furthermore, the case studies based on four common diseases and miRNAs prove that the BLNIMDA has good predictive performance.

Conclusions

Therefore, the BLNIMDA is an effective method for predicting hidden MDAs.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12864-022-08908-8.

miR2Trait: an integrated resource for investigating miRNA-disease associations

MicroRNAs are key components of cellular regulatory networks, and breakdown in miRNA function causes cascading effects leading to pathophenotypes. A better understanding of the role of miRNAs in diseases is essential for human health. Here, we have devised a method for comprehensively mapping the associations between miRNAs and diseases by merging on a common key between two curated omics databases. The resulting bidirectional resource, miR2Trait, is more detailed than earlier catalogs, uncovers new relationships, and includes analytical utilities to interrogate and extract knowledge from these datasets. miR2Trait provides resources to compute the disease enrichment of a user-given set of miRNAs and analyze the miRNA profile of a specified diseasome. Reproducible examples demonstrating use-cases for each of these resource components are illustrated. Furthermore we used these tools to construct pairwise miRNA-miRNA and disease-disease enrichment networks, and identified 23 central miRNAs that could underlie major regulatory functions in the human genome. miR2Trait is available as an open-source command-line interface in Python3 (URL: https://github.com/miR2Trait) with a companion wiki documenting the scripts and data resources developed, under MIT license for commercial and non-commercial use. A minimal web-based implementation has been made available at https://sas.sastra.edu/pymir18. Supplementary information is available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8288825.v3.

A message passing framework with multiple data integration for miRNA-disease association prediction

Micro RNA or miRNA is a highly conserved class of non-coding RNA that plays an important role in many diseases. Identifying miRNA-disease associations can pave the way for better clinical diagnosis and finding potential drug targets. We propose a biologically-motivated data-driven approach for the miRNA-disease association prediction, which overcomes the data scarcity problem by exploiting information from multiple data sources. The key idea is to enrich the existing miRNA/disease-protein-coding gene (PCG) associations via a message passing framework, followed by the use of disease ontology information for further feature filtering. The enriched and filtered PCG associations are then used to construct the inter-connected miRNA-PCG-disease network to train a structural deep network embedding (SDNE) model. Finally, the pre-trained embeddings and the biologically relevant features from the miRNA family and disease semantic similarity are concatenated to form the pair input representations to a Random Forest classifier whose task is to predict the miRNA-disease association probabilities. We present large-scale comparative experiments, ablation, and case studies to showcase our approach's superiority. Besides, we make the model prediction results for 1618 miRNAs and 3679 diseases, along with all related information, publicly available at  http://software.mpm.leibniz-ai-lab.de/ to foster assessments and future adoption.

Predicting miRNA-disease associations based on multi-view information fusion

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in various biological processes and their abnormal expression could lead to the occurrence of diseases. Exploring the potential relationships between miRNAs and diseases can contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases. The increasing databases storing miRNA and disease information provide opportunities to develop computational methods for discovering unobserved disease-related miRNAs, but there are still some challenges in how to effectively learn and fuse information from multi-source data. In this study, we propose a multi-view information fusion based method for miRNA-disease association (MDA)prediction, named MVIFMDA. Firstly, multiple heterogeneous networks are constructed by combining the known MDAs and different similarities of miRNAs and diseases based on multi-source information. Secondly, the topology features of miRNAs and diseases are obtained by using the graph convolutional network to each heterogeneous network view, respectively. Moreover, we design the attention strategy at the topology representation level to adaptively fuse representations including different structural information. Meanwhile, we learn the attribute representations of miRNAs and diseases from their similarity attribute views with convolutional neural networks, respectively. Finally, the complicated associations between miRNAs and diseases are reconstructed by applying a bilinear decoder to the combined features, which combine topology and attribute representations. Experimental results on the public dataset demonstrate that our proposed model consistently outperforms baseline methods. The case studies further show the ability of the MVIFMDA model for inferring underlying associations between miRNAs and diseases.

A clustering-based sampling method for miRNA-disease association prediction

More and more studies have proved that microRNAs (miRNAs) play a critical role in gene expression regulation, and the irregular expression of miRNAs tends to be associated with a variety of complex human diseases. Because of the high cost and low efficiency of identifying disease-associated miRNAs through biological experiments, scholars have focused on predicting potential disease-associated miRNAs by computational methods. Considering that the existing methods are flawed in constructing negative sample set, we proposed a clustering-based sampling method for miRNA-disease association prediction (CSMDA). Firstly, we integrated multiple similarity information of miRNA and disease to represent miRNA-disease pairs. Secondly, we performed a clustering-based sampling method to avoid introducing potential positive samples when constructing negative sample set. Thirdly, we employed a random forest-based feature selection method to reduce noise and redundant information in the high-dimensional feature space. Finally, we implemented an ensemble learning framework for predicting miRNA-disease associations by soft voting. The Precision, Recall, F1-score, AUROC and AUPR of the CSMDA achieved 0.9676, 0.9545, 0.9610, 0.9928, and 0.9940, respectively, under five-fold cross-validation. Besides, case study on three cancers showed that the top 20 potentially associated miRNAs predicted by the CSMDA were confirmed by the dbDEMC database or literatures. The above results demonstrate that the CSMDA can predict potential disease-associated miRNAs more accurately.

Inferring human miRNA–disease associations via multiple kernel fusion on GCNII

Increasing evidence shows that the occurrence of human complex diseases is closely related to the mutation and abnormal expression of microRNAs(miRNAs). MiRNAs have complex and fine regulatory mechanisms, which makes it a promising target for drug discovery and disease diagnosis. Therefore, predicting the potential miRNA-disease associations has practical significance. In this paper, we proposed an miRNA–disease association predicting method based on multiple kernel fusion on Graph Convolutional Network via Initial residual and Identity mapping (GCNII), called MKFGCNII. Firstly, we built a heterogeneous network of miRNAs and diseases to extract multi-layer features via GCNII. Secondly, multiple kernel fusion method was applied to weight fusion of embeddings at each layer. Finally, Dual Laplacian Regularized Least Squares was used to predict new miRNA–disease associations by the combined kernel in miRNA and disease spaces. Compared with the other methods, MKFGCNII obtained the highest AUC value of 0.9631. Code is available at https://github.com/cuntjx/bioInfo.

SFGAE: a self-feature-based graph autoencoder model for miRNA-disease associations prediction

Increasing evidence has suggested that microRNAs (miRNAs) are important biomarkers of various diseases. Numerous graph neural network (GNN) models have been proposed for predicting miRNA-disease associations. However, the existing GNN-based methods have over-smoothing issue-the learned feature embeddings of miRNA nodes and disease nodes are indistinguishable when stacking multiple GNN layers. This issue makes the performance of the methods sensitive to the number of layers, and significantly hurts the performance when more layers are employed. In this study, we resolve this issue by a novel self-feature-based graph autoencoder model, shortened as SFGAE. The key novelty of SFGAE is to construct miRNA-self embeddings and disease-self embeddings, and let them be independent of graph interactions between two types of nodes. The novel self-feature embeddings enrich the information of typical aggregated feature embeddings, which aggregate the information from direct neighbors and hence heavily rely on graph interactions. SFGAE adopts a graph encoder with attention mechanism to concatenate aggregated feature embeddings and self-feature embeddings, and adopts a bilinear decoder to predict links. Our experiments show that SFGAE achieves state-of-the-art performance. In particular, SFGAE improves the average AUC upon recent GAEMDA [1] on the benchmark datasets HMDD v2.0 and HMDD v3.2, and consistently performs better when less (e.g. 10%) training samples are used. Furthermore, SFGAE effectively overcomes the over-smoothing issue and performs stably well on deeper models (e.g. eight layers). Finally, we carry out case studies on three human diseases, colon neoplasms, esophageal neoplasms and kidney neoplasms, and perform a survival analysis using kidney neoplasm as an example. The results suggest that SFGAE is a reliable tool for predicting potential miRNA-disease associations.

Predict potential miRNA-disease associations based on bounded nuclear norm regularization

Increasing evidences show that the abnormal microRNA (miRNA) expression is related to a variety of complex human diseases. However, the current biological experiments to determine miRNA-disease associations are time consuming and expensive. Therefore, computational models to predict potential miRNA-disease associations are in urgent need. Though many miRNA-disease association prediction methods have been proposed, there is still a room to improve the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a matrix completion model with bounded nuclear norm regularization to predict potential miRNA-disease associations, which is called BNNRMDA. BNNRMDA at first constructs a heterogeneous miRNA-disease network integrating the information of miRNA self-similarity, disease self-similarity, and the known miRNA-disease associations, which is represented by an adjacent matrix. Then, it models the miRNA-disease prediction as a relaxed matrix completion with error tolerance, value boundary and nuclear norm minimization. Finally it implements the alternating direction method to solve the matrix completion problem. BNNRMDA makes full use of available information of miRNAs and diseases, and can deals with the data containing noise. Compared with four state-of-the-art methods, the experimental results show BNNRMDA achieved the best performance in five-fold cross-validation and leave-one-out cross-validation. The case studies on two complex human diseases showed that 47 of the top 50 prediction results of BNNRMDA have been verified in the latest HMDD database.

Application of Bidirectional Generative Adversarial Networks to Predict Potential miRNAs Associated With Diseases

Substantial evidence has shown that microRNAs are crucial for biological processes within complex human diseases. Identifying the association of miRNA–disease pairs will contribute to accelerating the discovery of potential biomarkers and pathogenesis. Researchers began to focus on constructing computational models to facilitate the progress of disease pathology and clinical medicine by identifying the potential disease-related miRNAs. However, most existing computational methods are expensive, and their use is limited to unobserved relationships for unknown miRNAs (diseases) without association information. In this manuscript, we proposed a creatively semi-supervised model named bidirectional generative adversarial network for miRNA-disease association prediction (BGANMDA). First, we constructed a microRNA similarity network, a disease similarity network, and Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity based on the known miRNA–disease association and comprehensive similarity of miRNAs (diseases). Next, an integrated similarity feature network with the full underlying relationships of miRNA–disease pairwise was obtained. Then, the similarity feature network was fed into the BGANMDA model to learn advanced traits in latent space. Finally, we ranked an association score list and predicted the associations between miRNA and disease. In our experiment, a five-fold cross validation was applied to estimate BGANMDA’s performance, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.9319 and a standard deviation of 0.00021 were obtained. At the same time, in the global and local leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV), the AUC value and standard deviation of BGANMDA were 0.9116 ± 0.0025 and 0.8928 ± 0.0022, respectively. Furthermore, BGANMDA was employed in three different case studies to validate its prediction capability and accuracy. The experimental results of the case studies showed that 46, 46, and 48 of the top 50 prediction lists had been identified in previous studies.

Predicting miRNA-disease associations based on graph attention network with multi-source information

BACKGROUND

There is a growing body of evidence from biological experiments suggesting that microRNAs (miRNAs) play a significant regulatory role in both diverse cellular activities and pathological processes. Exploring miRNA-disease associations not only can decipher pathogenic mechanisms but also provide treatment solutions for diseases. As it is inefficient to identify undiscovered relationships between diseases and miRNAs using biotechnology, an explosion of computational methods have been advanced. However, the prediction accuracy of existing models is hampered by the sparsity of known association network and single-category feature, which is hard to model the complicated relationships between diseases and miRNAs.

RESULTS

In this study, we advance a new computational framework (GATMDA) to discover unknown miRNA-disease associations based on graph attention network with multi-source information, which effectively fuses linear and non-linear features. In our method, the linear features of diseases and miRNAs are constructed by disease-lncRNA correlation profiles and miRNA-lncRNA correlation profiles, respectively. Then, the graph attention network is employed to extract the non-linear features of diseases and miRNAs by aggregating information of each neighbor with different weights. Finally, the random forest algorithm is applied to infer the disease-miRNA correlation pairs through fusing linear and non-linear features of diseases and miRNAs. As a result, GATMDA achieves impressive performance: an average AUC of 0.9566 with five-fold cross validation, which is superior to other previous models. In addition, case studies conducted on breast cancer, colon cancer and lymphoma indicate that 50, 50 and 48 out of the top fifty prioritized candidates are verified by biological experiments.

CONCLUSIONS

The extensive experimental results justify the accuracy and utility of GATMDA and we could anticipate that it may regard as a utility tool for identifying unobserved disease-miRNA relationships.

PIWI-interacting RNAs in human diseases: databases and computational models

PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are short 21-35 nucleotide molecules that comprise the largest class of non-coding RNAs and found in a large diversity of species including yeast, worms, flies, plants and mammals including humans. The most well-understood function of piRNAs is to monitor and protect the genome from transposons particularly in germline cells. Recent data suggest that piRNAs may have additional functions in somatic cells although they are expressed there in far lower abundance. Compared with microRNAs (miRNAs), piRNAs have more limited bioinformatics resources available. This review collates 39 piRNA specific and non-specific databases and bioinformatics resources, describes and compares their utility and attributes and provides an overview of their place in the field. In addition, we review 33 computational models based upon function: piRNA prediction, transposon element and mRNA-related piRNA prediction, cluster prediction, signature detection, target prediction and disease association. Based on the collection of databases and computational models, we identify trends and potential gaps in tool development. We further analyze the breadth and depth of piRNA data available in public sources, their contribution to specific human diseases, particularly in cancer and neurodegenerative conditions, and highlight a few specific piRNAs that appear to be associated with these diseases. This briefing presents the most recent and comprehensive mapping of piRNA bioinformatics resources including databases, models and tools for disease associations to date. Such a mapping should facilitate and stimulate further research on piRNAs.

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.

MLRDFM: a multi-view Laplacian regularized DeepFM model for predicting miRNA-disease associations

MOTIVATION

MicroRNAs (miRNAs), as critical regulators, are involved in various fundamental and vital biological processes, and their abnormalities are closely related to human diseases. Predicting disease-related miRNAs is beneficial to uncovering new biomarkers for the prevention, detection, prognosis, diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases.

RESULTS

In this study, we propose a multi-view Laplacian regularized deep factorization machine (DeepFM) model, MLRDFM, to predict novel miRNA-disease associations while improving the standard DeepFM. Specifically, MLRDFM improves DeepFM from two aspects: first, MLRDFM takes the relationships among items into consideration by regularizing their embedding features via their similarity-based Laplacians. In this study, miRNA Laplacian regularization integrates four types of miRNA similarity, while disease Laplacian regularization integrates two types of disease similarity. Second, to judiciously train our model, Laplacian eigenmaps are utilized to initialize the weights in the dense embedding layer. The experimental results on the latest HMDD v3.2 dataset show that MLRDFM improves the performance and reduces the overfitting phenomenon of DeepFM. Besides, MLRDFM is greatly superior to the state-of-the-art models in miRNA-disease association prediction in terms of different evaluation metrics with the 5-fold cross-validation. Furthermore, case studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of MLRDFM.

Research progress of miRNA-disease association prediction and comparison of related algorithms

With an in-depth understanding of noncoding ribonucleic acid (RNA), many studies have shown that microRNA (miRNA) plays an important role in human diseases. Because traditional biological experiments are time-consuming and laborious, new calculation methods have recently been developed to predict associations between miRNA and diseases. In this review, we collected various miRNA-disease association prediction models proposed in recent years and used two common data sets to evaluate the performance of the prediction models. First, we systematically summarized the commonly used databases and similarity data for predicting miRNA-disease associations, and then divided the various calculation models into four categories for summary and detailed introduction. In this study, two independent datasets (D5430 and D6088) were compiled to systematically evaluate 11 publicly available prediction tools for miRNA-disease associations. The experimental results indicate that the methods based on information dissemination and the method based on scoring function require shorter running time. The method based on matrix transformation often requires a longer running time, but the overall prediction result is better than the previous two methods. We hope that the summary of work related to miRNA and disease will provide comprehensive knowledge for predicting the relationship between miRNA and disease and contribute to advanced computation tools in the future.

Biomedical data, computational methods and tools for evaluating disease-disease associations

In recent decades, exploring potential relationships between diseases has been an active research field. With the rapid accumulation of disease-related biomedical data, a lot of computational methods and tools/platforms have been developed to reveal intrinsic relationship between diseases, which can provide useful insights to the study of complex diseases, e.g. understanding molecular mechanisms of diseases and discovering new treatment of diseases. Human complex diseases involve both external phenotypic abnormalities and complex internal molecular mechanisms in organisms. Computational methods with different types of biomedical data from phenotype to genotype can evaluate disease-disease associations at different levels, providing a comprehensive perspective for understanding diseases. In this review, available biomedical data and databases for evaluating disease-disease associations are first summarized. Then, existing computational methods for disease-disease associations are reviewed and classified into five groups in terms of the usages of biomedical data, including disease semantic-based, phenotype-based, function-based, representation learning-based and text mining-based methods. Further, we summarize software tools/platforms for computation and analysis of disease-disease associations. Finally, we give a discussion and summary on the research of disease-disease associations. This review provides a systematic overview for current disease association research, which could promote the development and applications of computational methods and tools/platforms for disease-disease associations.

Hierarchical graph attention network for miRNA-disease association prediction

Many biological studies show that the mutation and abnormal expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) could cause a variety of diseases. As an important biomarker for disease diagnosis, miRNA is helpful to understand pathogenesis, and could promote the identification, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. However, the pathogenic mechanism how miRNAs affect these diseases has not been fully understood. Therefore, predicting the potential miRNA-disease associations is of great importance for the development of clinical medicine and drug research. In this study, we proposed a novel deep learning model based on hierarchical graph attention network for predicting miRNA-disease associations (HGANMDA). Firstly, we constructed a miRNA-disease-lncRNA heterogeneous graph based on known miRNA-disease associations, miRNA-lncRNA associations and disease-lncRNA associations. Secondly, the node-layer attention was applied to learn the importance of neighbor nodes based on different meta-paths. Thirdly, the semantic-layer attention was applied to learn the importance of different meta-paths. Finally, a bilinear decoder was employed to reconstruct the connections between miRNAs and diseases. The extensive experimental results indicated that our model achieved good performance and satisfactory results in predicting miRNA-disease associations.

MIMRDA: A Method Incorporating the miRNA and mRNA Expression Profiles for Predicting miRNA-Disease Associations to Identify Key miRNAs (microRNAs)

Identifying cancer-related miRNAs (or microRNAs) that precisely target mRNAs is important for diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Creating novel methods to identify candidate miRNAs becomes an imminent Frontier of researches in the field. One major obstacle lies in the integration of the state-of-the-art databases. Here, we introduce a novel method, MIMRDA, which incorporates the miRNA and mRNA expression profiles for predicting miRNA-disease associations to identify key miRNAs. As a proof-of-principle study, we use the MIMRDA method to analyze TCGA datasets of 20 types (BLCA, BRCA, CESE, CHOL, COAD, ESCA, HNSC, KICH, KIRC, KIRP, LIHC, LUAD, LUSC, PAAD, PRAD, READ, SKCM, STAD, THCA and UCEC) of cancer, which identified hundreds of top-ranked miRNAs. Some (as Category 1) of them are endorsed by public databases including TCGA, miRTarBase, miR2Disease, HMDD, MISIM, ncDR and mTD; others (as Category 2) are supported by literature evidences. miR-21 (representing Category 1) and miR-1258 (representing Category 2) display the excellent characteristics of biomarkers in multi-dimensional assessments focusing on the function similarity analysis, overall survival analysis, and anti-cancer drugs’ sensitivity or resistance analysis. We compare the performance of the MIMRDA method over the Limma and SPIA packages, and estimate the accuracy of the MIMRDA method in classifying top-ranked miRNAs via the Random Forest simulation test. Our results indicate the superiority and effectiveness of the MIMRDA method, and recommend some top-ranked key miRNAs be potential biomarkers that warrant experimental validations.

Predicting miRNA-disease associations based on graph random propagation network and attention network

Numerous experiments have demonstrated that abnormal expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) in organisms is often accompanied by the emergence of specific diseases. The research of miRNAs can promote the prevention and drug research of specific diseases. However, there are still many undiscovered links between miRNAs and diseases, which greatly limits the research of miRNAs. Therefore, for exploring the unknown miRNA-disease associations, we combine the graph random propagation network based on DropFeature with attention network to propose a novel deep learning model to predict the miRNA-disease associations (GRPAMDA). Specifically, we firstly construct the miRNA-disease heterogeneous graph based on miRNA-disease association information. Secondly, we adopt DropFeature to randomly delete the features of nodes in the graph and then perform propagation operations to enhance the features of miRNA and disease nodes. Thirdly, we employ the attention mechanism to fuse the features of random propagation by aggregating the enhanced neighbor features of miRNA and disease nodes. Finally, miRNA-disease association scores are generated by a fully connected layer. The average area under the curve of GRPAMDA model based on 5-fold cross-validation is 93.46% on HMDD v2.0. Case studies of esophageal tumors, lymphomas and prostate tumors show that 48, 47 and 46 of the top 50 miRNAs associated with these diseases are confirmed by dbDEMC and miR2Disease database, respectively. In short, the GRPAMDA model can be used as a valuable method to study miRNA-disease associations.

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.

RFLMDA: A Novel Reinforcement Learning-Based Computational Model for Human MicroRNA-Disease Association Prediction

Numerous studies have confirmed that microRNAs play a crucial role in the research of complex human diseases. Identifying the relationship between miRNAs and diseases is important for improving the treatment of complex diseases. However, traditional biological experiments are not without restrictions. It is an urgent necessity for computational simulation to predict unknown miRNA-disease associations. In this work, we combine Q-learning algorithm of reinforcement learning to propose a RFLMDA model, three submodels CMF, NRLMF, and LapRLS are fused via Q-learning algorithm to obtain the optimal weight S. The performance of RFLMDA was evaluated through five-fold cross-validation and local validation. As a result, the optimal weight is obtained as S (0.1735, 0.2913, 0.5352), and the AUC is 0.9416. By comparing the experiments with other methods, it is proved that RFLMDA model has better performance. For better validate the predictive performance of RFLMDA, we use eight diseases for local verification and carry out case study on three common human diseases. Consequently, all the top 50 miRNAs related to Colorectal Neoplasms and Breast Neoplasms have been confirmed. Among the top 50 miRNAs related to Colon Neoplasms, Gastric Neoplasms, Pancreatic Neoplasms, Kidney Neoplasms, Esophageal Neoplasms, and Lymphoma, we confirm 47, 41, 49, 46, 46 and 48 miRNAs respectively.

TSMDA: Target and symptom-based computational model for miRNA-disease-association prediction

The emergence of high-throughput sequencing techniques has revealed a primary role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in a wide range of diseases, including cancers and neurodegenerative disorders. Understanding novel relationships between miRNAs and diseases can potentially unveil complex pathogenesis mechanisms, leading to effective diagnosis and treatment. The investigation of novel miRNA-disease associations, however, is currently costly and time consuming. Over the years, several computational models have been proposed to prioritize potential miRNA-disease associations, but with limited usability or predictive capability. In order to fill this gap, we introduce TSMDA, a novel machine-learning method that leverages target and symptom information and negative sample selection to predict miRNA-disease association. TSMDA significantly outperforms similar methods, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) of 0.989 and 0.982 under 5-fold cross-validation and blind test, respectively. We also demonstrate the capability of the method to uncover potential miRNA-disease associations in breast, prostate, and lung cancers, as case studies. We believe TSMDA will be an invaluable tool for the community to explore and prioritize potentially new miRNA-disease associations for further experimental characterization. The method was made available as a freely accessible and user-friendly web interface at http://biosig.unimelb.edu.au/tsmda/.

Bipartite graph-based collaborative matrix factorization method for predicting miRNA-disease associations

BACKGROUND

With the rapid development of various advanced biotechnologies, researchers in related fields have realized that microRNAs (miRNAs) play critical roles in many serious human diseases. However, experimental identification of new miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) is expensive and time-consuming. Practitioners have shown growing interest in methods for predicting potential MDAs. In recent years, an increasing number of computational methods for predicting novel MDAs have been developed, making a huge contribution to the research of human diseases and saving considerable time. In this paper, we proposed an efficient computational method, named bipartite graph-based collaborative matrix factorization (BGCMF), which is highly advantageous for predicting novel MDAs.

RESULTS

By combining two improved recommendation methods, a new model for predicting MDAs is generated. Based on the idea that some new miRNAs and diseases do not have any associations, we adopt the bipartite graph based on the collaborative matrix factorization method to complete the prediction. The BGCMF achieves a desirable result, with AUC of up to 0.9514 ± (0.0007) in the five-fold cross-validation experiments.

CONCLUSIONS

Five-fold cross-validation is used to evaluate the capabilities of our method. Simulation experiments are implemented to predict new MDAs. More importantly, the AUC value of our method is higher than those of some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, many associations between new miRNAs and new diseases are successfully predicted by performing simulation experiments, indicating that BGCMF is a useful method to predict more potential miRNAs with roles in various diseases.

EOESGC: predicting miRNA-disease associations based on embedding of embedding and simplified graph convolutional network

BACKGROUND

A large number of biological studies have shown that miRNAs are inextricably linked to many complex diseases. Studying the miRNA-disease associations could provide us a root cause understanding of the underlying pathogenesis in which promotes the progress of drug development. However, traditional biological experiments are very time-consuming and costly. Therefore, we come up with an efficient models to solve this challenge.

RESULTS

In this work, we propose a deep learning model called EOESGC to predict potential miRNA-disease associations based on embedding of embedding and simplified convolutional network. Firstly, integrated disease similarity, integrated miRNA similarity, and miRNA-disease association network are used to construct a coupled heterogeneous graph, and the edges with low similarity are removed to simplify the graph structure and ensure the effectiveness of edges. Secondly, the Embedding of embedding model (EOE) is used to learn edge information in the coupled heterogeneous graph. The training rule of the model is that the associated nodes are close to each other and the unassociated nodes are far away from each other. Based on this rule, edge information learned is added into node embedding as supplementary information to enrich node information. Then, node embedding of EOE model training as a new feature of miRNA and disease, and information aggregation is performed by simplified graph convolution model, in which each level of convolution can aggregate multi-hop neighbor information. In this step, we only use the miRNA-disease association network to further simplify the graph structure, thus reducing the computational complexity. Finally, feature embeddings of both miRNA and disease are spliced into the MLP for prediction. On the EOESGC evaluation part, the AUC, AUPR, and F1-score of our model are 0.9658, 0.8543 and 0.8644 by 5-fold cross-validation respectively. Compared with the latest published models, our model shows better results. In addition, we predict the top 20 potential miRNAs for breast cancer and lung cancer, most of which are validated in the dbDEMC and HMDD3.2 databases.

CONCLUSION

The comprehensive experimental results show that EOESGC can effectively identify the potential miRNA-disease associations.

An ensemble learning framework for potential miRNA-disease association prediction with positive-unlabeled data

To explore the pathogenic mechanisms of MicroRNA (miRNA) on diverse diseases, many researchers have concentrated on discovering the potential associations between miRNA and disease using machine learning methods. However, the prediction accuracy of supervised machine learning methods is limited by lacking of experimentally-validated uncorrelated miRNA-disease pairs. Without these negative samples, training a highly accurate model is much more difficult. Different from traditional miRNA-disease prediction models using randomly selected unknown samples as negative training samples, we propose an ensemble learning framework to solve this positive-unlabeled (PU) learning problem. The framework incorporates two steps, i.e., a novel semi-supervised Kmeans (SS-Kmeans) to extract reliable negative samples from unknown miRNA-disease pairs and subagging method to generate diverse training sample sets to make full use of those reliable negative samples for ensemble learning. Combined with effective random vector functional link (RVFL) network as prediction model, the proposed framework showed superior prediction accuracy comparing with other popular approaches. A case study on lung and gastric neoplasms further confirms the framework's efficacy at identifying miRNA disease associations.

Efficient framework for predicting MiRNA-disease associations based on improved hybrid collaborative filtering

BACKGROUND

Accumulating studies indicates that microRNAs (miRNAs) play vital roles in the process of development and progression of many human complex diseases. However, traditional biochemical experimental methods for identifying disease-related miRNAs cost large amount of time, manpower, material and financial resources.

METHODS

In this study, we developed a framework named hybrid collaborative filtering for miRNA-disease association prediction (HCFMDA) by integrating heterogeneous data, e.g., miRNA functional similarity, disease semantic similarity, known miRNA-disease association networks, and Gaussian kernel similarity of miRNAs and diseases. To capture the intrinsic interaction patterns embedded in the sparse association matrix, we prioritized the predictive score by fusing three types of information: similar disease associations, similar miRNA associations, and similar disease-miRNA associations. Meanwhile, singular value decomposition was adopted to reduce the impact of noise and accelerate predictive speed.

RESULTS

We then validated HCFMDA with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) and two types of case studies. In the LOOCV, we achieved 0.8379 of AUC (area under the curve). To evaluate the performance of HCFMDA on real diseases, we further implemented the first type of case validation over three important human diseases: Colon Neoplasms, Esophageal Neoplasms and Prostate Neoplasms. As a result, 44, 46 and 44 out of the top 50 predicted disease-related miRNAs were confirmed by experimental evidence. Moreover, the second type of case validation on Breast Neoplasms indicates that HCFMDA could also be applied to predict potential miRNAs towards those diseases without any known associated miRNA.

CONCLUSIONS

The satisfactory prediction performance demonstrates that our model could serve as a reliable tool to guide the following research for identifying candidate miRNAs associated with human diseases.

Biased Random Walk With Restart on Multilayer Heterogeneous Networks for MiRNA-Disease Association Prediction

Numerous experiments have proved that microRNAs (miRNAs) could be used as diagnostic biomarkers for many complex diseases. Thus, it is conceivable that predicting the unobserved associations between miRNAs and diseases is extremely significant for the medical field. Here, based on heterogeneous networks built on the information of known miRNA-disease associations, miRNA function similarity, disease semantic similarity, and Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity for miRNAs and diseases, we developed a computing model of biased random walk with restart on multilayer heterogeneous networks for miRNA-disease association prediction (BRWRMHMDA) through enforcing degree-based biased random walk with restart (BRWR). Assessment results reflected that an AUC of 0.8310 was gained in local leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV), which proved the calculation algorithm's good performance. Besides, we carried out BRWRMHMDA to prioritize candidate miRNAs for esophageal neoplasms based on HMDD v2.0. We further prioritize candidate miRNAs for breast neoplasms based on HMDD v1.0. The local LOOCV results and performance analysis of the case study all showed that the proposed model has good and stable performance.