AE-RW: Predicting miRNA-disease associations by using autoencoder and random walk on miRNA-gene-disease heterogeneous network

Since scientific investigations have demonstrated that aberrant expression of miRNAs brings about the incidence of numerous intricate diseases, precise determination of miRNA-disease relationships greatly contributes to the advancement of human medical progress. To tackle the issue of inefficient conventional experimental approaches, numerous computational methods have been proposed to predict miRNA-disease association with enhanced accuracy. However, constructing miRNA-gene-disease heterogeneous network by incorporating gene information has been relatively under-explored in existing computational techniques. Accordingly, this paper puts forward a technique to predict miRNA-disease association by applying autoencoder and implementing random walk on miRNA-gene-disease heterogeneous network(AE-RW). Firstly, we integrate association information and similarities between miRNAs, genes, and diseases to construct a miRNA-gene-disease heterogeneous network. Subsequently, we consolidate two network feature representations extracted independently via an autoencoder and a random walk procedure. Finally, deep neural network(DNN) are utilized to conduct association prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that the AE-RW model achieved an AUC of 0.9478 through 5-fold CV on the HMDD v3.2 dataset, outperforming the five most advanced existing models. Additionally, case studies were implemented for breast and lung cancer, further validated the superior predictive capabilities of our model.