Identification of Disease-Associated MicroRNAs Via Locality-Constrained Linear Coding-Based Ensemble Learning

Clinical trials indicate that the dysregulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) is closely associated with the development of diseases. Therefore, predicting miRNA-disease associations is significant for studying the pathogenesis of diseases. Since traditional wet-lab methods are resource-intensive, cost-saving computational models can be an effective complementary tool in biological experiments. In this work, a locality-constrained linear coding is proposed to predict associations (ILLCEL). Among them, ILLCEL adopts miRNA sequence similarity, miRNA functional similarity, disease semantic similarity, and interaction profile similarity obtained by locality-constrained linear coding (LLC) as the priori information. Next, features and similarities extracted from multiperspectives are input to the ensemble learning framework to improve the comprehensiveness of the prediction. Significantly, the introduction of hypergraph-regular terms improves the accuracy of prediction by describing complex associations between samples. The results under fivefold cross validation indicate that ILLCEL achieves superior prediction performance. In case studies, known associations are accurately predicted and novel associations are verified in HMDD v3.2, miRCancer, and existing literature. It is concluded that ILLCEL can be served as a powerful tool for inferring potential associations.