A miRNA-Disease Association Identification Method Based on Reliable Negative Sample Selection and Improved Single-Hidden Layer Feedforward Neural Network

miRNAs are a category of important endogenous non-coding small RNAs and are ubiquitous in eukaryotes. They are widely involved in the regulatory process of post-transcriptional gene expression and play a critical part in the development of human diseases. By utilizing recent advancements in big data technology, using bioinformatics methods to identify causative miRNA becomes a hot spot. In this paper, a method called RNSSLFN is proposed to identify the miRNA-disease associations by reliable negative sample selection and an improved single-hidden layer feedforward neural network (SLFN). It involves, firstly, obtaining integrated similarity for miRNAs and diseases; next, selecting reliable negative samples from unknown miRNA-disease associations via distinguishing up-regulated or down-regulated miRNAs; then, introducing an improved SLFN to solve the prediction task. The experimental results on the latest data sets HMDD v3.2 and the framework of 5-fold cross-validation (CV) show that the average AUC and AUPR of RNSSLFN achieve 0.9316 and 0.9065 m, respectively, which are superior to the other three state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, in the case studies of 10 common cancers, more than 70% of the top 30 predicted miRNA-disease association pairs are verified in the databases, which further confirms the reliability and effectiveness of the RNSSLFN model. Generally, RNSSLFN in predicting miRNA-disease associations has prodigious potential and extensive foreground.