BRWMDA:Predicting Microbe-Disease Associations Based on Similarities and Bi-Random Walk on Disease and Microbe Networks

Many current studies have evidenced that microbes play important roles in human diseases. Therefore, discovering the associations between microbes and diseases is beneficial to systematically understanding the mechanisms of diseases, diagnosing, and treating complex diseases. It is well known that finding new potential microbe-disease associations via biological experiments is a time-consuming and expensive process. However, the computation methods can provide an opportunity to effectively predict microbe-disease associations. In recent years, efforts toward predicting microbe-disease associations are not in proportional to the importance of microbes to human diseases. In this study, we develop a method (called BRWMDA) to predict new microbe-disease associations based on similarity and improving bi-random walk on the disease and microbe networks. BRWMDA integrates microbe network, disease network, and known microbe-disease associations into a single network. After calculating the Gaussian Interaction Profile (GIP) kernel similarity of microbes based on known microbe-disease associations, the microbe network is obtained by adjusting the similarity with the logistics function. In addition, the disease network is computed by the similarity network fusion (SNF) method with the symptom-based similarity and the GIP kernel similarity based on known microbe-disease associations. Then, these two networks of microbe and disease are connected by known microbe-disease associations. Based on the assumption that similar microbes are normally associated with similar diseases and vice versa, BRWMDA is employed to predict new potential microbe-disease associations via random walk with different steps on microbe and disease networks, which reasonably uses the similarity of microbe network and disease network. The 5-fold cross validation and Leave One Out Cross Validation (LOOCV) are adopted to assess the prediction performance of our BRWMDA algorithm, as well as other competing methods for comparison. 5-fold cross validation experiments show that BRWMDA obtained the maximum AUC value of 0.9087, which is again superior to other methods of 0.9025(NGRHMDA), 0.8797 (LRLSHMDA), 0.8571 (KATZHMDA), 0.7782 (HGBI), and 0.5629 (NBI). In addition, BRWMDA also outperforms other methods in terms of LOOCV, whose AUC value is 0.9397, which is superior to other methods of 0.9111(NGRHMDA), 0.8909 (LRLSHMDA), 0.8644 (KATZHMDA), 0.7866 (HGBI), and 0.5553 (NBI). Case studies also illustrate that BRWMDA is an effective method to predict microbe-disease associations.