LDAPred: A Method Based on Information Flow Propagation and a Convolutional Neural Network for the Prediction of Disease-Associated lncRNAs.

Journal: International journal of molecular sciences
Published Date:

Abstract

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play a crucial role in the pathogenesis and development of complex diseases. Predicting potential lncRNA-disease associations can improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of human diseases and help identify biomarkers for disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Previous research methods have mostly integrated the similarity and association information of lncRNAs and diseases, without considering the topological structure information among these nodes, which is important for predicting lncRNA-disease associations. We propose a method based on information flow propagation and convolutional neural networks, called LDAPred, to predict disease-related lncRNAs. LDAPred not only integrates the similarities, associations, and interactions among lncRNAs, diseases, and miRNAs, but also exploits the topological structures formed by them. In this study, we construct a dual convolutional neural network-based framework that comprises the left and right sides. The embedding layer on the left side is established by utilizing lncRNA, miRNA, and disease-related biological premises. On the right side of the frame, multiple types of similarity, association, and interaction relationships among lncRNAs, diseases, and miRNAs are calculated based on information flow propagation on the bi-layer networks, such as the lncRNA-disease network. They contain the network topological structure and they are learned by the right side of the framework. The experimental results based on five-fold cross-validation indicate that LDAPred performs better than several state-of-the-art methods. Case studies on breast cancer, colon cancer, and osteosarcoma further demonstrate LDAPred's ability to discover potential lncRNA-disease associations.

Authors

  • Ping Xuan
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Heilongjiang University, Harbin 150080, China.
  • Lan Jia
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Heilongjiang University, Harbin 150080, China.
  • Tiangang Zhang
    School of Mathematical Science, Heilongjiang University, Harbin 150080, China. zhang@hlju.edu.cn.
  • Nan Sheng
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Heilongjiang University, Harbin 150080, China.
  • Xiaokun Li
    Postdoctoral Program of Heilongjiang Hengxun Technology Co., Ltd., Harbin 150090, China. xiaokun_li_hx_hlju@163.com.
  • Jinbao Li
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Heilongjiang University, Harbin 150080, China. jbli@hlju.edu.cn.