Computational prediction of human disease-related microRNAs by path-based random walk

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small, endogenous RNAs that are 21–25 nucleotides in length. In animals and plants, miRNAs target specific genes for degradation or translation repression. Discovering disease-related miRNA is fundamental for understanding the pathogenesis of diseases. The association between miRNA and a disease is mainly determined via biological investigation, which is complicated by increased biological information due to big data from different databases. Researchers have utilized different computational methods to harmonize experimental approaches to discover miRNA that articulates restrictively in specific environmental situations. In this work, we present a prediction model that is based on the theory of path features and random walk to obtain a relevancy score of miRNA-related disease. In this model, highly ranked scores are potential miRNA-disease associations. Features were extracted from positive and negative samples of miRNA-disease association. Then, we compared our method with other presented models using the five-fold cross-validation method, which obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 88.6%. This indicated that our method has a better performance compared to previous methods and will help future biological investigations.