Uncover miRNA-Disease Association by Exploiting Global Network Similarity

Identification of miRNA-disease association is a fundamental challenge in human health clinic. However, the known miRNA-disease associations are rare and experimental verification methods are expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, there is a strong incentive to develop computational methods. In this paper, we calculate the similarity score for each miRNAs pair by integrating miRNA functional similarity and miRNA family information. We use the disease phenotype similarity data to construct the disease similarity network. Then we introduce a new miRNA-disease association prediction method (NETwork Group Similarity, NetGS) to explore the global network similarity, capturing the relationship between the disease and other diseases, the similarity between the potential disease-related miRNA and other miRNAs. Finally based on the consistency of diffusion profiles we get the miRNA-disease association scores. NetGS is tested by the leave-one-out cross validation and achieves an AUC value of 0.8450, which improves the prediction accuracy. NetGS can also be applied to solve the new miRNA-disease association and obtain reliable accuracy. Moreover, we use NetGS to predict new causing miRNAs of three cancers including breast cancer, lung cancer and Hepatocellular cancer. And the top predictions have been confirmed in the online databases. The encouraging results indicate that NetGS might play an essential role for future scientific research.