Background: A large number of biological studies have shown that miRNAs are inextricably linked to many complex diseases. Studying the miRNA−disease associations could provide us a root cause understanding on the underlying pathogenesis in which promotes the progress of drug development. However, traditional biological experiments are very time consuming and costly. Therefore, we come up with more efficient models to solve this challenge.
Results: In this work, we propose a deep learning model called EOESGC to predict potential miRNA−disease associations based on embedding of embedding and simplified convolutional network. Firstly, a coupled heterogeneous graph is constructed by using the integrated disease similarity, integrated miRNA similarity and miRNA−disease association networks where parts of the connected edges with less similarity values are removed to simplify the graph structure. The initial feature representation of nodes in the graph is learned using the embedding of embedding model(EOE) based on the principle that the nodes with associations are close to each other and the nodes without association are far from each other. The use of EOE can effectively learn the positional information among nodes and protect the graph structure information to some extent. Then the initial features of the nodes are fed into the simplified graph convolutional network(SGC), and in this step we only use miRNA−disease association network to further simplify the graph structure and thus reduce the computational complexity. Finally, feature embeddings of both miRNA and disease spliced into the MLP for prediction. The two graph simplifications of our model effectively reduce the computational difficulty, and the experimental results show that our model can indeed predict the potential miRNA−disease associations effectively. Compared with the latest published models, our model shows better results. On EOESGC evaluation part, the AUC, AUPR and F1 of our model are 0.9658, 0.8543 and 0.8644 by 5−fold cross validation respectively. In addition, we predict the top 20 potential miRNAs for breast cancer and lung cancer, most of which are validated in the dbDEMC and HMDD3.2 databases.
Conclusion: The comprehensive experimental results show that EOESGC can effectively identify the potential miRNA−disease associations.