HGPEC: a Cytoscape app for prediction of novel disease-gene and disease-disease associations and evidence collection based on a random walk on heterogeneous network

BACKGROUND: Finding gene-disease and disease-disease associations play important roles in the biomedical area and many prioritization methods have been proposed for this goal. Among them, approaches based on a heterogeneous network of genes and diseases are considered state-of-the-art ones, which achieve high prediction performance and can be used for diseases with/without known molecular basis. RESULTS: Here, we developed a Cytoscape app, namely HGPEC, based on a random walk with restart algorithm on a heterogeneous network of genes and diseases. This app can prioritize candidate genes and diseases by employing a heterogeneous network consisting of a network of genes/proteins and a phenotypic disease similarity network. Based on the rankings, novel disease-gene and disease-disease associations can be identified. These associations can be supported with network- and rank-based visualization as well as evidences and annotations from biomedical data. A case study on prediction of novel breast cancer-associated genes and diseases shows the abilities of HGPEC. In addition, we showed prominence in the performance of HGPEC compared to other tools for prioritization of candidate disease genes. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, our app is expected to effectively predict novel disease-gene and disease-disease associations and support network- and rank-based visualization as well as biomedical evidences for such the associations. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12918-017-0437-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.