2650 | Mol. BioSyst., 2017, 13, 2650--2659 This journal is
©
The Royal Society of Chemistry 2017
Cite this: Mol. BioSyst., 2017,
13,2650
NARRMDA: negative-aware and rating-based
recommendation algorithm for miRNA–disease
association prediction†
Lihong Peng,‡
a
Yeqing Chen,‡
b
Ning Ma
c
and Xing Chen *
d
An increasing amount of evidence indicates that microRNAs (miRNAs) are closely related to many
important biological processes and play a significant role in various human diseases. More and more
researchers have begun to seek effective methods to predict potential miRNA–disease associations.
However, reliable computational methods to predict potential disease-related miRNAs are lacking. In this
study, we developed a new miRNA–disease association prediction model called Negative-Aware and
rating-based Recommendation algorithm for miRNA–Disease Association prediction (NARRMDA) based
on the known miRNA–disease associations in the HMDD database, miRNA functional similarity, disease
semantic similarity and Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity. NARRMDA combined a rating-based
recommendation algorithm and a negative-aware algorithm to score and rank miRNAs without known
associations with investigated diseases. Furthermore, we used leave-one-out cross validation to evaluate
the accuracy of NARRMDA and compared NARRMDA with four previous classical prediction models
(RLSMDA, HDMP, RWRMDA and MCMDA). As it turned out, NARRMDA and the other four prediction
models achieved AUCs of 0.8053, 0.6953, 0.7702, 0.7891 and 0.7718, respectively, which proved that
NARRMDA has superior performance of prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we verified the prediction
results associated with colon neoplasms, esophageal neoplasms, lymphoma and breast neoplasms by
two different validation schemas. In these case studies, 92%, 84%, 92%, and 100% of the top 50 potential
miRNAs for these four diseases were confirmed by experimental discoveries, respectively. These results
further show that NARRMDA has reliable performance of prediction ability.
Introduction
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of short (B22 nt) endogenous
noncoding RNAs which have many important regulatory roles
in gene expression. It is generally recognized that miRNA
functions by binding to the 3’UTRs of the target mRNA through
sequence-specific base pairing at a post-transcriptional level.
1–4
A large number of research studies indicate that miRNAs are closely
related to many biological processes, such as cell proliferation,
5
cell
differentiation,
6
apoptosis,
7
signal transduction,
8
viral infection,
6
and the occurrence
9–14
and development
15
of many diseases,
especially cancer. Besides that, experiments indicate that each
miRNA could have more than one target gene, and multiple
miRNAs can regulate the same gene.
16
The networks based on
these complex relationships provide an approach to research
the associations between miRNAs and diseases based on genes
using computational and mathematical methods. Furthermore,
if we can discover the associations between miRNAs and
diseases, it would be possible to diagnose diseases at an early
stage, and even to control the occurrence and development of
diseases by regulating miRNAs through certain medical means.
Therefore, the large-scale study of the relationship between
miRNA and disease has become an important goal of biomedical
research.
17
To date, thousands of miRNAs have been discovered in
eukaryotic organisms by applying various experimental methods
and computational models. In addition, an increasing number
of experimentally verified human miRNA–disease associations
have been identified. An open human miRNA–disease associa-
tion database HMDD (http://www.cuilab.cn/hmdd), aiming to
collect experimental evidence of human miRNA–disease associa-
tions, has collected 10 368 miRNA–disease associations referring
a
College of Information Engineering, Changsha Medical University, Changsha,
410219, China
b
College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, China
c
College of Pharmacy, Changsha Medical University, Changsha, 410219, China
d
School of Information and Control Engineering, China University of Mining and
Technology, Xuz hou, 221116, China. E-mail: xingchen@amss.ac.cn
† Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/
c7mb00499k
‡ The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors
should be regarded as joint First Authors.
Received 10th August 2017,
Accepted 11th October 2017
DOI: 10.1039/c7mb00499k
rsc.li/molecular-biosystems
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