Revealing post-transcriptional microRNA–mRNA regulations in Alzheimer’s disease through ensemble graphs

BACKGROUND: In silico investigations on the integration of multiple datasets are in need of higher statistical power methods to unveil secondary findings that were hidden from the initial analyses. We present here a novel method for the network analysis of messenger RNA post-translational regulation by microRNA molecules. The method integrates expression data and sequence binding predictions through a set of sound machine learning techniques, forwarding all results to an ensemble graph of regulations. RESULTS: Bayesian network classifiers are induced based on a pool of ensemble graphs with ascending order of complexity. Individual goodness-of-fit and classification performances are evaluated for each learned model. As a testbed, four Alzheimer’s disease datasets are integrated using the new approach, achieving top values of 0.9794 ± 0.01 for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and 0.9439 ± 0.0234 for the prediction accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: Post-transcriptional regulations found by the optimal network classifier concur with previous literature findings. Furthermore, additional network structures suggest previously unreported regulations in the state of the art of Alzheimer’s research. The quantitative performance as well as sound biological findings provide confidence in the ensemble approach and encourage similar integrative analyses for other conditions. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12864-018-5025-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.