DBNLDA: Deep Belief Network based representation learning for lncRNA-disease association prediction

Background: The expanding research in the field of long non-coding RNAs(lncRNAs) showed abnormal expression of lncRNAs in many complex diseases. Accurately identifying lncRNA-disease association is essential in understanding lncRNA functionality and disease mechanism. There are many machine learning techniques involved in the prediction of lncRNA-disease association which use different biological interaction networks and associated features. Feature learning from the network structured data is one of the limiting factors of machine learning-based methods. Graph neural network based techniques solve this limitation by unsupervised feature learning. Deep belief networks (DBN) are recently used in biological network analysis to learn the latent representations of network features. Method: In this paper, we propose a DBN based lncRNA-disease association prediction model (DBNLDA) from lncRNA, disease and miRNA interactions. The architecture contains three major modules-network construction, DBN based feature learning and neural network-based prediction. First, we constructed three heterogeneous networks such as lncRNA-miRNA similarity (LMS), disease-miRNA similarity (DMS) and lncRNA-disease association (LDA) network. From the node embedding matrices of similarity networks, lncRNA-disease representations were learned separately by two DBN based subnetworks. The joint representation of lncRNA-disease was learned by a third DBN from outputs of the two subnetworks mentioned. This joint feature representation was used to predict the association score by an ANN classifier. Result: The proposed method obtained AUC of 0.96 and AUPR of 0.967 when tested against standard dataset used by the state-of-the-art methods. Analysis on breast, lung and stomach cancer cases also affirmed the effectiveness of DBNLDA in predicting significant lncRNA-disease associations.