Measuring disease similarity and predicting disease-related ncRNAs by a novel method

BACKGROUND: Similar diseases are always caused by similar molecular origins, such as diasease-related protein-coding genes (PCGs). And the molecular associations reflect their similarity. Therefore, current methods for calculating disease similarity often utilized functional interactions of PCGs. Besides, the existing methods have neglected a fact that genes could also be associated in the gene functional network (GFN) based on intermediate nodes. METHODS: Here we presented a novel method, InfDisSim, to deduce the similarity of diseases. InfDisSim utilized the whole network based on random walk with damping to model the information flow. A benchmark set of similar disease pairs was employed to evaluate the performance of InfDisSim. RESULTS: The region beneath the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was calculated to assess the performance. As a result, InfDisSim reaches a high AUC (0.9786) which indicates a very good performance. Furthermore, after calculating the disease similarity by the InfDisSim, we reconfirmed that similar diseases tend to have common therapeutic drugs (Pearson correlation γ(2) = 0.1315, p = 2.2e-16). Finally, the disease similarity computed by infDisSim was employed to construct a miRNA similarity network (MSN) and lncRNA similarity network (LSN), which were further exploited to predict potential associations of lncRNA-disease pairs and miRNA-disease pairs, respectively. High AUC (0.9893, 0.9007) based on leave-one-out cross validation shows that the LSN and MSN is very appropriate for predicting novel disease-related lncRNAs and miRNAs, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The high AUC based on benchmark data indicates the method performs well. The method is valuable in the prediction of disease-related lncRNAs and miRNAs. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi: 10.1186/s12920-017-0315-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.