In recent years, lncRNAs (long non-coding RNAs) have been proved to be closely related to many diseases that are seriously harmful to human health. Although researches on clarifying the relationships between lncRNAs and diseases are developing rapidly, associations between the lncRNAs and diseases are still remaining largely unknown. In this manuscript, a novel Local Random Walk based prediction model called LRWHLDA is proposed for inferring potential associations between human lncRNAs and diseases. In LRWHLDA, a new heterogeneous network is established first, which allows that LRWHLDA can be implemented in the case of lacking known lncRNA-disease associations. And then,an improved local random walk method is designed for prediction of novel lncRNA-disease associations, which can help LRWHLDA achieve high prediction accuracy but with low time complexity. Finally, in order to evaluate the prediction performance of LRWHLDA, different frameworks such as LOOCV, 2-fold CV and 5-fold CV have been implemented, simulation results indicate that LRWHLDA can achieve reliable AUCs of 0.8061, 0.8357, and 0.8556 under the frameworks of 2-fold CV, 5-fold CV and LOOCV respectively. Hence, it is easy to know that LRWHLDA contains the potential to be a representative of emerging methods in the field of research on potential lncRNA-disease association prediction.

Recently, numerous laboratory studies have indicated that many microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in and associated with human diseases and can serve as potential biomarkers and drug targets. Therefore, developing effective computational models for the prediction of novel associations between diseases and miRNAs could be beneficial for achieving an understanding of disease mechanisms at the miRNA level and the interactions between diseases and miRNAs at the disease level. Thus far, only a few miRNA-disease association pairs are known, and models analyzing miRNA-disease associations based on lncRNA are limited. In this study, a new computational method based on a distance correlation set is developed to predict miRNA-disease associations (DCSMDA) by integrating known lncRNA-disease associations, known miRNA-lncRNA associations, disease semantic similarity, and various lncRNA and disease similarity measures. The novelty of DCSMDA is due to the construction of a miRNA-lncRNA-disease network, which reveals that DCSMDA can be applied to predict potential lncRNA-disease associations without requiring any known miRNA-disease associations. Although the implementation of DCSMDA does not require known disease-miRNA associations, the area under curve is 0.8155 in the leave-one-out cross validation. Furthermore, DCSMDA was implemented in case studies of prostatic neoplasms, lung neoplasms and leukaemia, and of the top 10 predicted associations, 10, 9 and 9 associations, respectively, were separately verified in other independent studies and biological experimental studies. In addition, 10 of the 10 (100%) associations predicted by DCSMDA were supported by recent bioinformatical studies. According to the simulation results, DCSMDA can be a great addition to the biomedical research field.