Sparse Independence Component Analysis for Competitive Endogenous RNA Co-Module Identification in Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Objective: Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been shown to be associated with the pathogenesis of different kinds of diseases and play important roles in various biological processes. Although numerous lncRNAs have been found, the functions of most lncRNAs and physiological/pathological significance are still in its infancy. Meanwhile, their expression patterns and regulation mechanisms are also far from being fully understood. Methods: In order to reveal functional lncRNAs and identify the key lncRNAs, we develop a new sparse independence component analysis (ICA) method to identify lncRNA-mRNA-miRNA expression co-modules based on the competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) theory using the sample-matched lncRNA, mRNA and miRNA expression profiles. The expression data of the three RNA combined together is approximated sparsely to obtain the corresponding sparsity coefficient, and then it is decomposed by using ICA constraint optimization to obtain the common basis and modules. Subsequently, affine propagation clustering is used to perform cluster analysis on the common basis under multiple running conditions to obtain the co-modules for the selection of different RNA elements. Results: We applied sparse ICA to Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma (LIHC) dataset and the experiment results demonstrate that the proposed sparse ICA method can effectively discover biologically functional expression common modules. Conclusion: It may provide insights into the function of lncRNAs and molecular mechanism of LIHC. Clinical and Translational Impact Statement–The results on LIHC dataset demonstrate that the proposed sparse ICA method can effectively discover biologically functional expression common modules, which may provide insights into the function of IncRNAs and molecular mechanism of LIHC.