Human Microbe-Disease Association Prediction by a Novel Double-Ended Random Walk with Restart

Microorganisms in the human body play a vital role in metabolism, immune defense, nutrient absorption, cancer control, and prevention of pathogen colonization. More and more biological and clinical studies have shown that the imbalance of microbial communities is closely related to the occurrence and development of various complex human diseases. Finding potential microbial-disease associations is critical for understanding the pathology of a few diseases and thus further improving disease diagnosis and prognosis. In this study, we proposed a novel computational model to predict disease-associated microbes. Specifically, we first constructed a heterogeneous interconnection network based on known microbe-disease associations deposited in a few databases, the similarity between diseases, and the similarity between microorganisms. We then predicted novel microbe-disease associations by a new method called the double-ended restart random walk model (DRWHMDA) implemented on the interconnection network. In addition, we performed case studies of colon cancer and asthma for further evaluation. The results indicate that 10 and 9 of the top 10 microorganisms predicted to be associated with colorectal cancer and asthma were validated by relevant literatures, respectively. Our method is expected to be effective in identifying disease-related microorganisms and will help to reveal the relationship between microorganisms and complex human diseases.