IMS-CDA: Prediction of CircRNA-Disease associations from the integration of multisource similarity information with deep stacked autoencoder model

Emerging evidence indicates that circular RNA (circRNA) has been an indispensable role in the pathogenesis of human complex diseases and many critical biological processes. Using circRNA as a molecular marker or therapeutic target opens up a new avenue for our treatment and detection of human complex diseases. The traditional biological experiments, however, are usually limited to small scale and are time consuming, so the development of an effective and feasible computational-based approach for predicting circRNA-disease associations is increasingly favored. In this study, we propose a new computational-based method, called IMS-CDA, to predict potential circRNA-disease associations based on multisource biological information. More specifically, IMS-CDA combines the information from the disease semantic similarity, the Jaccard and Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity of disease and circRNA, and extracts the hidden features using the stacked autoencoder (SAE) algorithm of deep learning. After training in the rotation forest (RF) classifier, IMS-CDA achieves 88.08% area under the ROC curve with 88.36% accuracy at the sensitivity of 91.38% on the CIRCR2Disease dataset. Compared with the state-of-the-art support vector machine and K-nearest neighbor models and different descriptor models, IMS-CDA achieves the best overall performance. In the case studies, eight of the top 15 circRNA-disease associations with the highest prediction score were confirmed by recent literature. These results indicated that IMS-CDA has an outstanding ability to predict new circRNA-disease associations and can provide reliable candidates for biological experiments.