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Accumulating evidence indicates that microRNAs (miRNAs) can control and coordinate various biological processes. Consequently, abnormal expressions of miRNAs have been linked to various complex diseases. Recognizable proof of miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) will contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. Nevertheless, traditional experimental verification of MDAs is laborious and limited to small-scale. Therefore, it is necessary to develop reliable and effective computational methods to predict novel MDAs. In this work, a multi-kernel graph attention deep autoencoder (MGADAE) method is proposed to predict potential MDAs. In detail, MGADAE first employs the multiple kernel learning (MKL) algorithm to construct an integrated miRNA similarity and disease similarity, providing more biological information for further feature learning. Second, MGADAE combines the known MDAs, disease similarity, and miRNA similarity into a heterogeneous network, then learns the representations of miRNAs and diseases through graph convolution operation. After that, an attention mechanism is introduced into MGADAE to integrate the representations from multiple graph convolutional network (GCN) layers. Lastly, the integrated representations of miRNAs and diseases are input into the bilinear decoder to obtain the final predicted association scores. Corresponding experiments prove that the proposed method outperforms existing advanced approaches in MDA prediction. Furthermore, case studies related to two human cancers provide further confirmation of the reliability of MGADAE in practice.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology is famous for providing a microscopic view to help capture cellular heterogeneity. This characteristic has advanced the field of genomics by enabling the delicate differentiation of cell types. However, the properties of single-cell datasets, such as high dropout events, noise, and high dimensionality, are still a research challenge in the single-cell field. To utilize single-cell data more efficiently and to better explore the heterogeneity among cells, a new graph autoencoder (GAE)-based consensus-guided model (scGAC) is proposed in this article. The data are preprocessed into multiple top-level feature datasets. Then, feature learning is performed by using GAEs to generate new feature matrices, followed by similarity learning based on distance fusion methods. The learned similarity matrices are fed back to the GAEs to guide their feature learning process. Finally, the abovementioned steps are iterated continuously to integrate the final consistent similarity matrix and perform other related downstream analyses. The scGAC model can accurately identify critical features and effectively preserve the internal structure of the data. This can further improve the accuracy of cell type identification.

The roles of brain region activities and genotypic functions in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remain unclear. Meanwhile, current imaging genetics methods are difficult to identify potential pathogenetic markers by correlation analysis between brain network and genetic variation. To discover disease-related brain connectome from the specific brain structure and the fine-grained level, based on the Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) and human Brainnetome atlases, the functional brain network is first constructed for each subject. Specifically, the upper triangle elements of the functional connectivity matrix are extracted as connectivity features. The clustering coefficient and the average weighted node degree are developed to assess the significance of every brain area. Since the constructed brain network and genetic data are characterized by non-linearity, high-dimensionality, and few subjects, the deep subspace clustering algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the original data. Our multilayer neural network helps capture the non-linear manifolds, and subspace clustering learns pairwise affinities between samples. Moreover, most approaches in neuroimaging genetics are unsupervised learning, neglecting the diagnostic information related to diseases. We presented a label constraint with diagnostic status to instruct the imaging genetics correlation analysis. To this end, a diagnosis-guided deep subspace clustering association (DDSCA) method is developed to discover brain connectome and risk genetic factors by integrating genotypes with functional network phenotypes. Extensive experiments prove that DDSCA achieves superior performance to most association methods and effectively selects disease-relevant genetic markers and brain connectome at the coarse-grained and fine-grained levels.

CircRNA has been proved to play an important role in the diseases diagnosis and treatment. Considering that the wet-lab is time-consuming and expensive, computational methods are viable alternative in these years. However, the number of circRNA-disease associations (CDAs) that can be verified is relatively few, and some methods do not take full advantage of dependencies between attributes. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel method based on Kernel Fusion and Deep Auto-encoder (KFDAE) to predict the potential associations between circRNAs and diseases. Firstly, KFDAE uses a non-linear method to fuse the circRNA similarity kernels and disease similarity kernels. Then the vectors are connected to make the positive and negative sample sets, and these data are send to deep auto-encoder to reduce dimension and extract features. Finally, three-layer deep feedforward neural network is used to learn features and gain the prediction score. The experimental results show that compared with existing methods, KFDAE achieves the best performance. In addition, the results of case studies prove the effectiveness and practical significance of KFDAE, which means KFDAE is able to capture more comprehensive information and generate credible candidate for subsequent wet-lab.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq) technology has emerged as a powerful tool to investigate cellular heterogeneity within tissues, organs, and organisms. One fundamental question pertaining to single-cell gene expression data analysis revolves around the identification of cell types, which constitutes a critical step within the data processing workflow. However, existing methods for cell type identification through learning low-dimensional latent embeddings often overlook the intercellular structural relationships. In this paper, we present a novel non-negative low-rank similarity correction model (NLRSIM) that leverages subspace clustering to preserve the global structure among cells. This model introduces a novel manifold learning process to address the issue of imbalanced neighbourhood spatial density in cells, thereby effectively preserving local geometric structures. This procedure utilizes a position-sensitive hashing algorithm to construct the graph structure of the data. The experimental results demonstrate that the NLRSIM surpasses other advanced models in terms of clustering effects and visualization experiments. The validated effectiveness of gene expression information after calibration by the NLRSIM model has been duly ascertained in the realm of relevant biological studies. The NLRSIM model offers unprecedented insights into gene expression, states, and structures at the individual cellular level, thereby contributing novel perspectives to the field.

Advances in omics technology have enriched the understanding of the biological mechanisms of diseases, which has provided a new approach for cancer research. Multi-omics data contain different levels of cancer information, and comprehensive analysis of them has attracted wide attention. However, limited by the dimensionality of matrix models, traditional methods cannot fully use the key high-dimensional global structure of multi-omics data. Moreover, besides global information, local features within each omics are also critical. It is necessary to consider the potential local information together with the high-dimensional global information, ensuring that the shared and complementary features of the omics data are comprehensively observed. In view of the above, this article proposes a new tensor integrative framework called the strong complementarity tensor decomposition model (BioSTD) for cancer multi-omics data. It is used to identify cancer subtype specific genes and cluster subtype samples. Different from the matrix framework, BioSTD utilizes multi-view tensors to coordinate each omics to maximize high-dimensional spatial relationships, which jointly considers the different characteristics of different omics data. Meanwhile, we propose the concept of strong complementarity constraint applicable to omics data and introduce it into BioSTD. Strong complementarity is used to explore the potential local information, which can enhance the separability of different subtypes, allowing consistency and complementarity in the omics data to be fully represented. Experimental results on real cancer datasets show that our model outperforms other advanced models, which confirms its validity.

An Increase in microbial activity is shown to be intimately connected with the pathogenesis of diseases. Considering the expense of traditional verification methods, researchers are working to develop high-efficiency methods for detecting potential disease-related microbes. In this article, a new prediction method, MSF-LRR, is established, which uses Low-Rank Representation (LRR) to perform multi-similarity information fusion to predict disease-related microbes. Considering that most existing methods only use one class of similarity, three classes of microbe and disease similarity are added. Then, LRR is used to obtain low-rank structural similarity information. Additionally, the method adaptively extracts the local low-rank structure of the data from a global perspective, to make the information used for the prediction more effective. Finally, a neighbor-based prediction method that utilizes the concept of collaborative filtering is applied to predict unknown microbe-disease pairs. As a result, the AUC value of MSF-LRR is superior to other existing algorithms under 5-fold cross-validation. Furthermore, in case studies, excluding originally known associations, 16 and 19 of the top 20 microbes associated with Bacterial Vaginosis and Irritable Bowel Syndrome, respectively, have been confirmed by the recent literature. In summary, MSF-LRR is a good predictor of potential microbe-disease associations and can contribute to drug discovery and biological research.

Identifying drug-disease associations (DDAs) is critical to the development of drugs. Traditional methods to determine DDAs are expensive and inefficient. Therefore, it is imperative to develop more accurate and effective methods for DDAs prediction. Most current DDAs prediction methods utilize original DDAs matrix directly. However, the original DDAs matrix is sparse, which greatly affects the prediction consequences. Hence, a prediction method based on multi-similarities graph convolutional autoencoder (MSGCA) is proposed for DDAs prediction. First, MSGCA integrates multiple drug similarities and disease similarities using centered kernel alignment-based multiple kernel learning (CKA-MKL) algorithm to form new drug similarity and disease similarity, respectively. Second, the new drug and disease similarities are improved by linear neighborhood, and the DDAs matrix is reconstructed by weighted K nearest neighbor profiles. Next, the reconstructed DDAs and the improved drug and disease similarities are integrated into a heterogeneous network. Finally, the graph convolutional autoencoder with attention mechanism is utilized to predict DDAs. Compared with extant methods, MSGCA shows superior results on three datasets. Furthermore, case studies further demonstrate the reliability of MSGCA.

With the development of bioinformatics, the important role played by lncRNAs in various intractable diseases has aroused the interest of many experts. In recent studies, researchers have found that several human diseases are related to lncRANs. Moreover, it is very difficult and expensive to explore the unknown lncRNA-disease associations (LDAs), so only a few associations have been confirmed. It is vital to find a more accurate and effective method to identify potential LDAs. In this study, a method of collaborative matrix factorization based on correntropy (LDCMFC) is proposed for the identification of potential LDAs. To improve the robustness of the algorithm, the traditional minimization of the Euclidean distance is replaced with the maximized correntropy. In addition, the weighted K nearest known neighbor (WKNKN) method is used to rebuild the adjacency matrix. Finally, the performance of LDCMFC is tested by 5-fold cross-validation. Compared with other traditional methods, LDACMFC obtains a higher AUC of 0.8628. In different types of studies of three important cancer cases, most of the potentially relevant lncRNAs derived from the experiments have been validated in the databases. The final result shows that LDCMFC is a feasible method to predict LDAs.

Studies have revealed that microbes have an important effect on numerous physiological processes, and further research on the links between diseases and microbes is significant. Given that laboratory methods are expensive and not optimized, computational models are increasingly used for discovering disease-related microbes. Here, a new neighbor approach based on two-tier Bi-Random Walk is proposed for potential disease-related microbes, known as NTBiRW. In this method, the first step is to construct multiple microbe similarities and disease similarities. Then, three kinds of microbe/disease similarity are integrated through two-tier Bi-Random Walk to obtain the final integrated microbe/disease similarity network with different weights. Finally, Weighted K Nearest Known Neighbors (WKNKN) is used for prediction based on the final similarity network. In addition, leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) and 5-fold cross-validation (5-fold CV) are applied for evaluating the performance of NTBiRW. Multiple evaluating indicators are taken to show the performance from multiple perspectives. And most of the evaluation index values of NTBiRW are better than those of the compared methods. Moreover, in case studies on atopic dermatitis and psoriasis, most of the first 10 candidates in the final result can be proven. This also demonstrates the capability of NTBiRW for discovering new associations. Therefore, this method can contribute to the discovery of disease-related microbes and thus offer new thoughts for further understanding the pathogenesis of diseases.

Background: Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has been extensively used in gene expression data. However, most NMF-based methods have single-layer structures, which may achieve poor performance for complex data. Deep learning, with its carefully designed hierarchical structure, has shown significant advantages in learning data features. Objective: In bioinformatics, on the one hand, to discover differentially expressed genes in gene expression data; on the other hand, to obtain higher sample clustering results. It can provide the reference value for the prevention and treatment of cancer. Method: In this paper, we apply a deep NMF method called Deep Semi-NMF on the integrated gene expression data. In each layer, the coefficient matrix is directly decomposed into the basic and coefficient matrix of the next layer. We apply this factorization model on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) genomic data. Results: The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of Deep Semi-NMF method in identifying differentially expressed genes and clustering samples. Conclusion: The Deep Semi-NMF model decomposes a matrix into multiple matrices and multiplies them to form a matrix. It can also improve the clustering performance of samples while digging out more accurate key genes for disease treatment.

In recent years, multi-view classification and feature selection methods have received close attention in many fields. However, in many practical classification problems, the data in each view may contain a lot of noises. In addition, when data are of high dimensions and small sample attributes, it is difficult to remove redundant features in feature selection experiments. To deal with these problems well, the sparse multi-view low-rank regression method is proposed in this paper. The method based on sparse and low-rank theory introduces the penalty factors in the matrix transformation process to decompose the matrix into sparse and low-rank results. The model is constructed by imposing L2-norm and L2,1-norm constraints on the objective function. Experimental results on sequencing data show that the proposed method has superior performance over several state-of-the-art methods in multi-view classification and feature selection.

Background: As a method to identify Differentially Expressed Genes (DEGs), Non- Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has been widely praised in bioinformatics. Although NMF can make DEGs to be easily identified, it cannot provide more associated information for these DEGs. Objective: The methods of network analysis can be used to analyze the correlation of genes, but they caused more data redundancy and great complexity in gene association analysis of high dimensions. Dimensionality reduction is worth considering in this condition. Methods: In this paper, we provide a new framework by combining the merits of two: NMF is applied to select DEGs for dimensionality reduction, and then Weighted Gene Co-Expression Network Analysis (WGCNA) is introduced to cluster on DEGs into similar function modules. The combination of NMF and WGCNA as a novel model accomplishes the analysis of DEGs for cholangiocarcinoma (CHOL). Results: Some hub genes from DEGs are highlighted in the co-expression network. Candidate pathways and genes are also discovered in the most relevant module of CHOL. Conclusion: The experiments indicate that our framework is effective and the works also provide some useful clues to the reaches of CHOL.

Principal component analysis (PCA) has been used to study the pathogenesis of diseases. To enhance the interpretability of classical PCA, various improved PCA methods have been proposed to date. Among these, a typical method is the so-called sparse PCA, which focuses on seeking sparse loadings. However, the performance of these methods is still far from satisfactory due to their limitation of using unsupervised learning methods; moreover, the class ambiguity within the sample is high. To overcome this problem, this paper developed a new PCA method, which is named the supervised discriminative sparse PCA (SDSPCA). The main innovation of this method is the incorporation of discriminative information and sparsity into the PCA model. Specifically, in contrast to the traditional sparse PCA, which imposes sparsity on the loadings, here, sparse components are obtained to represent the data. Furthermore, via the linear transformation, the sparse components approximate the given label information. On the one hand, sparse components improve interpretability over the traditional PCA, while on the other hand, they are have discriminative abilities suitable for classification purposes. A simple algorithm is developed, and its convergence proof is provided. SDSPCA has been applied to the common-characteristic gene selection and tumor classification on multiview biological data. The sparsity and classification performance of SDSPCA are empirically verified via abundant, reasonable, and effective experiments, and the obtained results demonstrate that SDSPCA outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Low-rank representation (LRR) has attracted lots of attentions in recent years. However, LRR has a chief shortcoming, which uses the nuclear norm to approximate the non-convex rank function. This approximation minimises all singular values, thus the nuclear norm may not approximate to the rank function well. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank method that replaces the nuclear norm with the truncated nuclear norm to approximate the rank function. And it is applied to identifying differentially expressed genes. The truncated nuclear norm is defined as the sum of some smaller singular values which may be a better measure to approximate the rank function than the nuclear norm. In order to achieve the convergence of our method, the optimisation problem of our method is solved by the augmented Lagrange multiplier method that has the property of convergence. The experimental results demonstrate that our method exceeds LLRR, TRPCA and RPCA methods.

Background: As one of the most popular data representation methods, non-negative matrix decomposition (NMF) has been widely concerned in the tasks of clustering and feature selection. However, most of the previously proposed NMF-based methods do not adequately explore the hidden geometrical structure in the data. At the same time, noise and outliers are inevitably present in the data. Results: To alleviate these problems, we present a novel NMF framework named robust hypergraph regularized non-negative matrix factorization (RHNMF). In particular, the hypergraph Laplacian regularization is imposed to capture the geometric information of original data. Unlike graph Laplacian regularization which captures the relationship between pairwise sample points, it captures the high-order relationship among more sample points. Moreover, the robustness of the RHNMF is enhanced by using the L2,1-norm constraint when estimating the residual. This is because the L2,1-norm is insensitive to noise and outliers. Conclusions: Clustering and common abnormal expression gene (com-abnormal expression gene) selection are conducted to test the validity of the RHNMF model. Extensive experimental results on multi-view datasets reveal that our proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.