Adaptive multi-view multi-label learning for identifying disease-associated candidate miRNAs

PLoS Comput Biol. 2019 Apr 1;15(4):e1006931. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006931. eCollection 2019 Apr.

Abstract

Increasing evidence has indicated that microRNAs(miRNAs) play vital roles in various pathological processes and thus are closely related with many complex human diseases. The identification of potential disease-related miRNAs offers new opportunities to understand disease etiology and pathogenesis. Although there have been numerous computational methods proposed to predict reliable miRNA-disease associations, they suffer from various limitations that affect the prediction accuracy and their applicability. In this study, we develop a novel method to discover disease-related candidate miRNAs based on Adaptive Multi-View Multi-Label learning(AMVML). Specifically, considering the inherent noise existed in the current dataset, we propose to learn a new affinity graph adaptively for both diseases and miRNAs from multiple similarity profiles. We then simultaneously update the miRNA-disease association predicted from both spaces based on multi-label learning. In particular, we prove the convergence of AMVML theoretically and the corresponding analysis indicates that it has a fast convergence rate. To comprehensively illustrate the prediction performance of our method, we compared AMVML with four state-of-the-art methods under different validation frameworks. As a result, our method achieved comparable performance under various evaluation metrics, which suggests that our method is capable of discovering greater number of true miRNA-disease associations. The case study conducted on thyroid neoplasms further identified a potential diagnostic biomarker. Together, the experimental results confirms the utility of our method and we anticipate that our method could serve as a reliable and efficient tool for uncovering novel disease-related miRNAs.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Biomarkers, Tumor / genetics
  • Computational Biology
  • Genetic Association Studies / statistics & numerical data
  • Genetic Predisposition to Disease*
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning* / statistics & numerical data
  • MicroRNAs / genetics*
  • Models, Genetic
  • Models, Statistical
  • Thyroid Neoplasms / genetics

Substances

  • Biomarkers, Tumor
  • MicroRNAs

Grants and funding

CL was supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61602283) and Natural Science Foundation of Shandong (Grant No. ZR2016FB10). JWL was supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61572180, 61873089). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.