Recent studies have revealed that long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are closely linked to several human diseases, providing new opportunities for their use in detection and therapy. Many graph propagation and similarity fusion approaches can be used for predicting potential lncRNA–disease associations. However, existing similarity fusion approaches suffer from noise and self-similarity loss in the fusion process. To address these problems, a new prediction approach, termed SSMF-BLNP, based on organically combining selective similarity matrix fusion (SSMF) and bidirectional linear neighborhood label propagation (BLNP), is proposed in this paper to predict lncRNA–disease associations. In SSMF, self-similarity networks of lncRNAs and diseases are obtained by selective preprocessing and nonlinear iterative fusion. The fusion process assigns weights to each initial similarity network and introduces a unit matrix that can reduce noise and compensate for the loss of self-similarity. In BLNP, the initial lncRNA–disease associations are employed in both lncRNA and disease directions as label information for linear neighborhood label propagation. The propagation was then performed on the self-similarity network obtained from SSMF to derive the scoring matrix for predicting the relationships between lncRNAs and diseases. Experimental results showed that SSMF-BLNP performed better than seven other state of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, a case study demonstrated up to 100% and 80% accuracy in 10 lncRNAs associated with hepatocellular carcinoma and 10 lncRNAs associated with renal cell carcinoma, respectively. The source code and datasets used in this paper are available at: https://github.com/RuiBingo/SSMF-BLNP.

Drug repositioning, a method that relies on the information from the original drug–disease association matrix, aims to identify new indications for existing drugs and is expected to greatly reduce the cost and time of drug development. However, most current drug repositioning methods make use of the original drug–disease association matrix directly without preconditioning. As relatively only a few associations between drugs and diseases have been determined from actual observations, the original drug–disease association matrix used in the prediction is sparse, which affects the performance of the prediction method. A method for mining similar features of drugs and diseases is still lacking. To solve these problems, we developed a bipartite graph diffusion algorithm with multiple similarity integration for drug–disease association prediction (BGMSDDA). First, the weight K nearest known neighbors (WKNKN) algorithm was used to reconstruct the drug–disease association matrix. Secondly, an effective method was designed to extract similar characteristics of drugs and diseases based on integrating linear neighborhood similarity and Gaussian kernel similarity. Finally, bipartite graph diffusion was used to infer undiscovered drug–disease associations. After carrying out 10-fold cross-validation experiments, BGMSDDA showed excellent performance on two datasets, specifically with AUC values of 0.939 (Fdataset) and 0.954 (Cdataset), and AUPR values of 0.466 (Fdataset) and 0.565 (Cdataset). Furthermore, to evaluate the accuracy of the results of BGMSDDA, we conducted case studies on three medically used drugs selected from Fdataset and Cdataset and validated the predictive associated diseases of each drug with some databases. Based on the results obtained, BGMSDDA was demonstrated to be useful for predicting drug–disease associations.

In recent years, an increasing number of biological experiments and clinical reports have shown that lncRNA is closely related to the development of various complex human diseases. Therefore, studying the relationship between lncRNA and disease is necessary. Doing so not only helps to understand the disease mechanism, but also facilitates the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of disease. However, understanding the relationship between lncRNA and disease through biological experiments and clinical studies requires considerable time and money. Over the years, many researchers have developed computational methods to predict potential lncRNA–disease associations. In this study, on the basis of the assumption that functionally similar lncRNAs tend to associate with phenotypically similar diseases, and vice versa, we propose a novel computational method called network consistency projection for human lncRNA–disease associations (NCPHLDA) to predict potential lncRNA–disease associations. This method integrates a lncRNA cosine similarity network, a disease cosine similarity network, and the known lncRNA–disease association network. NCPHLDA is not only a parameterless method but also does not require a negative sample. More importantly, NCPHLDA can predict lncRNA without any known associated diseases. AUC values of 0.9273 and 0.9179 ± 0.0043 are obtained by implementing leave-one-out cross-validation and 5-fold cross-validation for NCPHLDA, respectively. Case studies of three diseases (breast cancer, cervical cancer, and hepatocellular carcinoma) indicate that NCPHLDA has reliable predictive performance. The source code of NCPHLDA is freely available at https://github.com/bryanze/NCPHLDA.

In the field of software protection, when there is a dependency between the various software protection technologies, the application order of these technologies must be arranged in a correct way in order to maximize the protection effect. If applying these technologies in a random way as the traditional methods do, an unexpected consequence may be produced such as weakening the software protection effect, and causing the protected software malfunction. To solve this problem, in this paper, a Petri net model is developed to describe the dependency behavior of applying multiple protection technologies. Then, algorithm is proposed to generate the reachable marking graph for the obtained Petri model. In considering different user requirements, based on the reachable marking graph, a method is presented to obtain a user-required and correct sequence of applying multiple protection technologies. The correctness of the obtained sequence is verified by a finite state automaton model. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the traditional ones.