MDformer: A transformer-based method for predicting miRNA-Disease associations using multi-source feature fusion and maximal meta-path instances encoding

There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that microRNAs (miRNAs), small biological molecules, play a crucial role in the diagnosis, treatment, and prognostic assessment of diseases. However, it is often inefficient to verify the association between miRNAs and diseases (MDA) through traditional experimental methods. Based on this situation, researchers have proposed various computational-based methods, but the existing methods often have many drawbacks in terms of predictive effectiveness and accuracy. Therefore, in order to improve the prediction performance of computational methods, we propose a transformer-based prediction model (MDformer) for multi-source feature information. Specifically, first, we consider multiple features of miRNAs and diseases from the molecular biology perspective and utilize them in a fusion. Then high-quality node feature embeddings were generated using a feature encoder based on the transformer architecture and meta-path instances. Finally, a deep neural network was built for MDA prediction. To evaluate the performance of our model, we performed multiple 5-fold cross-validations as well as comparison experiments on HMDD v3.2 and HMDD v2.0 databases, and the experimental results of the average ROC area under the curve (AUC) were higher than the comparative methods for both databases at 0.9506 and 0.9369. We conducted case studies on five highly lethal cancers (breast, lung, colorectal, gastric, and hepatocellular cancers), and the first 30 predictions for these five diseases achieved 97.3% accuracy. In conclusion, MDformer is a reliable and scientifically sound tool that can be used to accurately predict MDA. In addition, the source code is available at https://github.com/Linda908/MDformer.