A Novel Approach Based on a Weighted Interactive Network to Predict Associations of MiRNAs and Diseases

Accumulating evidence progressively indicated that microRNAs (miRNAs) play a significant role in the pathogenesis of diseases through many experimental studies; therefore, developing powerful computational models to identify potential human miRNA–disease associations is vital for an understanding of the disease etiology and pathogenesis. In this paper, a weighted interactive network was firstly constructed by combining known miRNA–disease associations, as well as the integrated similarity between diseases and the integrated similarity between miRNAs. Then, a new computational method implementing the newly weighted interactive network was developed for discovering potential miRNA–disease associations (WINMDA) by integrating the T most similar neighbors and the shortest path algorithm. Simulation results show that WINMDA can achieve reliable area under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve (AUC) results of 0.9183 ± 0.0007 in 5-fold cross-validation, 0.9200 ± 0.0004 in 10-fold cross-validation, 0.9243 in global leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV), and 0.8856 in local LOOCV. Furthermore, case studies of colon neoplasms, gastric neoplasms, and prostate neoplasms based on the Human microRNA Disease Database (HMDD) database were implemented, for which 94% (colon neoplasms), 96% (gastric neoplasms), and 96% (prostate neoplasms) of the top 50 predicting miRNAs were confirmed by recent experimental reports, which also demonstrates that WINMDA can effectively uncover potential miRNA–disease associations.