Biological experiments have confirmed the association between miRNAs and various diseases. However, such experiments are costly and time consuming. Computational methods help select potential disease-related miRNAs to improve the efficiency of biological experiments. In this work, we develop a novel method using multiple types of data to calculate miRNA and disease similarity based on mutual information, and add miRNA family and cluster information to predict human disease-related miRNAs (FCMDAP). This method not only depends on known miRNA-diseases associations but also accurately measures miRNA and disease similarity and resolves the problem of overestimation. FCMDAP uses the k most similar neighbor recommendation algorithm to predict the association score between miRNA and disease. Information about miRNA cluster is also used to improve prediction accuracy. FCMDAP achieves an average AUC of 0.9165 based on leave-one-out cross validation. Results confirm the 100, 98 and 96% of the top 50 predicted miRNAs reported in case studies on colorectal, lung, and pancreatic neoplasms. FCMDAP also exhibits satisfactory performance in predicting diseases without any related miRNAs and miRNAs without any related diseases. In this study, we present a computational method FCMDAP to improve the prediction accuracy of disease related miRNAs. FCMDAP could be an effective tool for further biological experiments.

There is strong evidence to support that mutations and dysregulation of miRNAs are associated with a variety of diseases, including cancer. However, the experimental methods used to identify disease-related miRNAs are expensive and time-consuming. Effective computational approaches to identify disease-related miRNAs are in high demand and would aid in the detection of lncRNA biomarkers for disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. In this study, we develop an ensemble learning framework to reveal the potential associations between miRNAs and diseases (ELMDA). The ELMDA framework does not rely on the known associations when calculating miRNA and disease similarities and uses multi-classifiers voting to predict disease-related miRNAs. As a result, the average AUC of the ELMDA framework was 0.9229 for the HMDD v2.0 database in a fivefold cross-validation. All potential associations in the HMDD V2.0 database were predicted, and 90% of the top 50 results were verified with the updated HMDD V3.2 database. The ELMDA framework was implemented to investigate gastric neoplasms, prostate neoplasms and colon neoplasms, and 100%, 94%, and 90%, respectively, of the top 50 potential miRNAs were validated by the HMDD V3.2 database. Moreover, the ELMDA framework can predict isolated disease-related miRNAs. In conclusion, ELMDA appears to be a reliable method to uncover disease-associated miRNAs.