An integrated framework for the identification of potential miRNA-disease association based on novel negative samples extraction strategy

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human complex diseases. Predicting potential miRNA-disease associations could provide important prior information for medical researchers. Therefore, reliable computational models are expected to be an effective supplement for inferring associations between miRNAs and diseases. In this study, we developed a novel calculative model named Negative Samples Extraction based MiRNA-Disease Association prediction (NSEMDA). NSEMDA filtered reliable negative samples by two positive-unlabeled learning models, namely, the Spy and Rocchio techniques and calculated similarity weights for ambiguous samples. The positive samples, reliable negative samples and ambiguous samples with similarity weights were used to construct a Support Vector Machine-Similarity Weight model to predict miRNA-disease associations. NSEMDA improved the credibility of negative samples and reduced the impact of noise samples by introducing ambiguous samples with similarity weights to train prediction model. As a result, NSEMDA achieved the AUC of 0.8899 in global leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) and AUC of 0.8353 under local LOOCV. In 100 times 5-fold cross validation, NSEMDA obtained an average AUC of 0.8878 and standard deviation of 0.0014. These AUCs are higher than many classical models. Besides, we also carried out three kinds of case studies to evaluate the performance of NSEMDA. Among the top 50 potential related miRNAs of esophageal neoplasms, lung neoplasms and carcinoma hepatocellular predicted by NSEMDA, 46, 50 and 45 miRNAs were verified to be associated with the investigated disease by experimental evidences, respectively. Therefore, NSEMDA would be a reliable calculative model for inferring miRNA-disease associations.