Discovering functional impacts of miRNAs in cancers using a causal deep learning model.
Journal:
BMC medical genomics
Published Date:
Dec 31, 2018
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) play a significant role in regulating gene expression under physiological and pathological conditions such as cancers. However, it remains a challenging problem to discover the target messenger RNAs (mRNAs) of a miRNA in a data driven fashion. On one hand, sequence-based methods for predicting miRNA targets tend to make too many false positive calls. On the other hand, analyzing expression correlation between miRNAs and mRNAs cannot establish whether relationship between a pair of correlated miRNA and mRNA is causal.