DAmiRLocGNet: miRNA subcellular localization prediction by combining miRNA–disease associations and graph convolutional networks

Abstract MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are human post-transcriptional regulators in humans, which are involved in regulating various physiological processes by regulating the gene expression. The subcellular localization of miRNAs plays a crucial role in the discovery of their biological functions. Although several computational methods based on miRNA functional similarity networks have been presented to identify the subcellular localization of miRNAs, it remains difficult for these approaches to effectively extract well-referenced miRNA functional representations due to insufficient miRNA–disease association representation and disease semantic representation. Currently, there has been a significant amount of research on miRNA–disease associations, making it possible to address the issue of insufficient miRNA functional representation. In this work, a novel model is established, named DAmiRLocGNet, based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and autoencoder (AE) for identifying the subcellular localizations of miRNA. The DAmiRLocGNet constructs the features based on miRNA sequence information, miRNA–disease association information and disease semantic information. GCN is utilized to gather the information of neighboring nodes and capture the implicit information of network structures from miRNA–disease association information and disease semantic information. AE is employed to capture sequence semantics from sequence similarity networks. The evaluation demonstrates that the performance of DAmiRLocGNet is superior to other competing computational approaches, benefiting from implicit features captured by using GCNs. The DAmiRLocGNet has the potential to be applied to the identification of subcellular localization of other non-coding RNAs. Moreover, it can facilitate further investigation into the functional mechanisms underlying miRNA localization. The source code and datasets are accessed at http://bliulab.net/DAmiRLocGNet.