iCircDA-NEAE: Accelerated attribute network embedding and dynamic convolutional autoencoder for circRNA-disease associations prediction

PLoS Comput Biol. 2023 Aug 31;19(8):e1011344. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011344. eCollection 2023 Aug.

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that circRNAs play crucial roles in human diseases. CircRNA-disease association prediction is extremely helpful in understanding pathogenesis, diagnosis, and prevention, as well as identifying relevant biomarkers. During the past few years, a large number of deep learning (DL) based methods have been proposed for predicting circRNA-disease association and achieved impressive prediction performance. However, there are two main drawbacks to these methods. The first is these methods underutilize biometric information in the data. Second, the features extracted by these methods are not outstanding to represent association characteristics between circRNAs and diseases. In this study, we developed a novel deep learning model, named iCircDA-NEAE, to predict circRNA-disease associations. In particular, we use disease semantic similarity, Gaussian interaction profile kernel, circRNA expression profile similarity, and Jaccard similarity simultaneously for the first time, and extract hidden features based on accelerated attribute network embedding (AANE) and dynamic convolutional autoencoder (DCAE). Experimental results on the circR2Disease dataset show that iCircDA-NEAE outperforms other competing methods significantly. Besides, 16 of the top 20 circRNA-disease pairs with the highest prediction scores were validated by relevant literature. Furthermore, we observe that iCircDA-NEAE can effectively predict new potential circRNA-disease associations.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Humans
  • RNA, Circular* / genetics
  • Semantics

Substances

  • RNA, Circular

Grants and funding

DSH is supported by STI 2030—Major Projects (No. 2021ZD0200403), the National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2018AAA0100100 & 2018YFA0902600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 62002266, 61932008, and 62073231), the Key Project of Science and Technology of Guangxi (Grant no. 2021AB20147), Guangxi Natural Science Foundation (Grant nos. 2022JJD170019 & 2021JJA170204 & 2021JJA170199) and Guangxi Science and Technology Base and Talents Special Project (Grant nos. 2021AC19354 & 2021AC19394), CHZ is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U19A2064), LY is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62002189), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (No. ZR2020QF038) and Technology Small and Medium Enterprises Innovation Capability Improvement Project of Shandong Province (No. 2023TSGC0279), ZS is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62102200), YSG is supported by the 20 Planned Projects in Jinan (No. 2021GXRC046) and the Excellent Teaching Team Training Plan Project of QILU UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.