Identification of miRNA-Small Molecule Associations by Continuous Feature Representation Using Auto-Encoders

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs that play important roles in the body and affect various diseases, including cancers. Controlling miRNAs with small molecules is studied herein to provide new drug repurposing perspectives for miRNA-related diseases. Experimental methods are time- and effort-consuming, so computational techniques have been applied, relying mostly on biological feature similarities and a network-based scheme to infer new miRNA–small molecule associations. Collecting such features is time-consuming and may be impractical. Here we suggest an alternative method of similarity calculation, representing miRNAs and small molecules through continuous feature representation. This representation is learned by the proposed deep learning auto-encoder architecture. Our suggested representation was compared to previous works and achieved comparable results using 5-fold cross validation (92% identified within top 25% predictions), and better predictions for most of the case studies (avg. of 31% vs. 25% identified within the top 25% of predictions). The results proved the effectiveness of our proposed method to replace previous time- and effort-consuming methods.