Interactive visual analysis of miRNA target prediction results

Integrated analysis of mRNA and miRNAs is essential to comprehend regulation of gene expression. In this paper, we present a case study with miRTarVis, a recently introduced visual analytics tool that supports effective visualizations of the miRNA target prediction results. In the case study, we evaluate the feasibility of miRTarVis by applying it to analyzing miRNA-mRNA expression profiles from TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) breast cancer dataset. Our study results show that miRTarVis can be effective in confirming the previously reported miRNA-mRNA interactions, and it has potential to help researchers generate new hypotheses when it is applied to new dataset.