Incorporating higher order network structures to improve miRNA-disease association prediction based on functional modularity

As microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in many essential biological processes, their abnormal expressions can serve as biomarkers and prognostic indicators to prevent the development of complex diseases, thus providing accurate early detection and prognostic evaluation. Although a number of computational methods have been proposed to predict miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) for further experimental verification, their performance is limited primarily by the inadequacy of exploiting lower order patterns characterizing known MDAs to identify missing ones from MDA networks. Hence, in this work, we present a novel prediction model, namely HiSCMDA, by incorporating higher order network structures for improved performance of MDA prediction. To this end, HiSCMDA first integrates miRNA similarity network, disease similarity network and MDA network to preserve the advantages of all these networks. After that, it identifies overlapping functional modules from the integrated network by predefining several higher order connectivity patterns of interest. Last, a path-based scoring function is designed to infer potential MDAs based on network paths across related functional modules. HiSCMDA yields the best performance across all datasets and evaluation metrics in the cross-validation and independent validation experiments. Furthermore, in the case studies, 49 and 50 out of the top 50 miRNAs, respectively, predicted for colon neoplasms and lung neoplasms have been validated by well-established databases. Experimental results show that rich higher order organizational structures exposed in the MDA network gain new insight into the MDA prediction based on higher order connectivity patterns.