Inferring miRNA-disease associations using collaborative filtering and resource allocation on a tripartite graph.

BACKGROUND: Developing efficient and successful computational methods to infer potential miRNA-disease associations is urgently needed and is attracting many computer scientists in recent years. The reason is that miRNAs are involved in many important biological processes and it is tremendously expensive and time-consuming to do biological experiments to verify miRNA-disease associations. METHODS: In this paper, we proposed a new method to infer miRNA-disease associations using collaborative filtering and resource allocation algorithms on a miRNA-disease-lncRNA tripartite graph. It combined the collaborative filtering algorithm in CFNBC model to solve the problem of imbalanced data and the method for association prediction established multiple types of known associations among multiple objects presented in TPGLDA model. RESULTS: The experimental results showed that our proposed method achieved a reliable performance with Area Under Roc Curve (AUC) and Area Under Precision-Recall Curve (AUPR) values of 0.9788 and 0.9373, respectively, under fivefold-cross-validation experiments. It outperformed than some other previous methods such as DCSMDA and TPGLDA. Furthermore, it demonstrated the ability to derive new associations between miRNAs and diseases among 8, 19 and 14 new associations out of top 40 predicted associations in case studies of Prostatic Neoplasms, Heart Failure, and Glioma diseases, respectively. All of these new predicted associations have been confirmed by recent literatures. Besides, it could discover new associations for new diseases (or miRNAs) without any known associations as demonstrated in the case study of Open-angle glaucoma disease. CONCLUSION: With the reliable performance to infer new associations between miRNAs and diseases as well as to discover new associations for new diseases (or miRNAs) without any known associations, our proposed method can be considered as a powerful tool to infer miRNA-disease associations.

Predicting miRNA-disease associations using improved random walk with restart and integrating multiple similarities.

Predicting beneficial and valuable miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) by doing biological laboratory experiments is costly and time-consuming. Proposing a forceful and meaningful computational method for predicting MDAs is essential and captivated many computer scientists in recent years. In this paper, we proposed a new computational method to predict miRNA-disease associations using improved random walk with restart and integrating multiple similarities (RWRMMDA). We used a WKNKN algorithm as a pre-processing step to solve the problem of sparsity and incompletion of data to reduce the negative impact of a large number of missing associations. Two heterogeneous networks in disease and miRNA spaces were built by integrating multiple similarity networks, respectively, and different walk probabilities could be designated to each linked neighbor node of the disease or miRNA node in line with its degree in respective networks. Finally, an improve extended random walk with restart algorithm based on miRNA similarity-based and disease similarity-based heterogeneous networks was used to calculate miRNA-disease association prediction probabilities. The experiments showed that our proposed method achieved a momentous performance with Global LOOCV AUC (Area Under Roc Curve) and AUPR (Area Under Precision-Recall Curve) values of 0.9882 and 0.9066, respectively. And the best AUC and AUPR values under fivefold cross-validation of 0.9855 and 0.8642 which are proven by statistical tests, respectively. In comparison with other previous related methods, it outperformed than NTSHMDA, PMFMDA, IMCMDA and MCLPMDA methods in both AUC and AUPR values. In case studies of Breast Neoplasms, Carcinoma Hepatocellular and Stomach Neoplasms diseases, it inferred 1, 12 and 7 new associations out of top 40 predicted associated miRNAs for each disease, respectively. All of these new inferred associations have been confirmed in different databases or literatures.