IRWNRLPI: Integrating Random Walk and Neighborhood Regularized Logistic Matrix Factorization for lncRNA-Protein Interaction Prediction

Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) plays an important role in many important biological processes and has attracted widespread attention. Although the precise functions and mechanisms for most lncRNAs are still unknown, we are certain that lncRNAs usually perform their functions by interacting with the corresponding RNA- binding proteins. For example, lncRNA-protein interactions play an important role in post transcriptional gene regulation, such as splicing, translation, signaling, and advances in complex diseases. However, experimental verification of lncRNA-protein interactions prediction is time-consuming and laborious. In this work, we propose a computational method, named IRWNRLPI, to find the potential associations between lncRNAs and proteins. IRWNRLPI integrates two algorithms, random walk and neighborhood regularized logistic matrix factorization, which can optimize a lot more than using an algorithm alone. Moreover, the method is semi-supervised and does not require negative samples. Based on the leave-one-out cross validation, we obtain the AUC of 0.9150 and the AUPR of 0.7138, demonstrating its reliable performance. In addition, by means of case study in the “Mus musculus,” many lncRNA-protein interactions which are predicted by our method can be successfully confirmed by experiments. This suggests that IRWNRLPI will be a useful bioinformatics resource in biomedical research.