Spatial transcriptomics provides a novel perspective for comprehending the intricate relationship between tissue structure and function, as well as for discovering new cell types and subtypes. However, it remains a significant challenge to accurately identify spatial domains with similar gene expression, which requires efficient combination of gene expression data , histology image information, and spatial location. To address this challenge, a novel dual denoising autoencoder with attention mechanism (STDDAE) is proposed. STDDAE integrates gene expression data, histology image information and spatial location, and the decoder consists of a master decoder and a follower decoder, which are jointly optimized to generate low-dimensional latent embeddings for precise spatial domain identification. The performance of STDDAE was evaluated across four datasets with varying resolutions and platforms. The experimental findings validated that STDDAE outperformed other cutting-edg methods in spatial domain identification, trajectory inference, and data denoising. Additionally, STDDAE successfully detected differentially expressed genes within identified spatial domains, which may be valuable in disease diagnosis, prognostic assessment, and treatment selection.

Drug repositioning (DR) has emerged as an effective method of identifying new indications for existing drugs. Many DR methods have demonstrated superior performance. However, most of them utilize a limited number of biological entities, ignoring the critical role of other entities in addressing data sparsity as well as improving model generalization capabilities. In addition, fully capturing high-order information of biological data still needs to be fully explored. To address above issues, a model based on transformer and enhanced multi-view contrastive learning (TEMCL) is proposed for predicting drug-disease associations (DDAs). Firstly, transformer is employed to obtain high-order features of nodes from similarity information. Secondly, based on similarity matrices and association matrices of nodes, two different types of views are constructed, i.e., homogeneous hypergraphs and heterogeneous association graphs. Among them, to alleviate sparsity problem existing in heterogeneous graphs, protein nodes as well as meta-path enhancement strategy are introduced. Thirdly, hypergraph convolutional network and heterogeneous graph transformer are used to extract node features on above two types of views, respectively. Contrastive learning is applied to obtain more representative features. Finally, multilayer perceptron (MLP) is used for predicting DDAs. Experiments show that TEMCL outperforms existing methods on DR task, exhibiting superior performance. In addition, case studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of this model. TEMCL provides new insights for identifying novel DDAs.

The roles of brain region activities and genotypic functions in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remain unclear. Meanwhile, current imaging genetics methods are difficult to identify potential pathogenetic markers by correlation analysis between brain network and genetic variation. To discover disease-related brain connectome from the specific brain structure and the fine-grained level, based on the Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) and human Brainnetome atlases, the functional brain network is first constructed for each subject. Specifically, the upper triangle elements of the functional connectivity matrix are extracted as connectivity features. The clustering coefficient and the average weighted node degree are developed to assess the significance of every brain area. Since the constructed brain network and genetic data are characterized by non-linearity, high-dimensionality, and few subjects, the deep subspace clustering algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the original data. Our multilayer neural network helps capture the non-linear manifolds, and subspace clustering learns pairwise affinities between samples. Moreover, most approaches in neuroimaging genetics are unsupervised learning, neglecting the diagnostic information related to diseases. We presented a label constraint with diagnostic status to instruct the imaging genetics correlation analysis. To this end, a diagnosis-guided deep subspace clustering association (DDSCA) method is developed to discover brain connectome and risk genetic factors by integrating genotypes with functional network phenotypes. Extensive experiments prove that DDSCA achieves superior performance to most association methods and effectively selects disease-relevant genetic markers and brain connectome at the coarse-grained and fine-grained levels.

Accumulating evidence indicates that microRNAs (miRNAs) can control and coordinate various biological processes. Consequently, abnormal expressions of miRNAs have been linked to various complex diseases. Recognizable proof of miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) will contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. Nevertheless, traditional experimental verification of MDAs is laborious and limited to small-scale. Therefore, it is necessary to develop reliable and effective computational methods to predict novel MDAs. In this work, a multi-kernel graph attention deep autoencoder (MGADAE) method is proposed to predict potential MDAs. In detail, MGADAE first employs the multiple kernel learning (MKL) algorithm to construct an integrated miRNA similarity and disease similarity, providing more biological information for further feature learning. Second, MGADAE combines the known MDAs, disease similarity, and miRNA similarity into a heterogeneous network, then learns the representations of miRNAs and diseases through graph convolution operation. After that, an attention mechanism is introduced into MGADAE to integrate the representations from multiple graph convolutional network (GCN) layers. Lastly, the integrated representations of miRNAs and diseases are input into the bilinear decoder to obtain the final predicted association scores. Corresponding experiments prove that the proposed method outperforms existing advanced approaches in MDA prediction. Furthermore, case studies related to two human cancers provide further confirmation of the reliability of MGADAE in practice.

The pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is extremely intricate, which makes AD patients almost incurable. Recent studies have demonstrated that analyzing multi-modal data can offer a comprehensive perspective on the different stages of AD progression, which is beneficial for early diagnosis of AD. In this paper, we propose a deep self-reconstruction fusion similarity hashing (DS-FSH) method to effectively capture the AD-related biomarkers from the multi-modal data and leverage them to diagnose AD. Given that most existing methods ignore the topological structure of the data, a deep self-reconstruction model based on random walk graph regularization is designed to reconstruct the multi-modal data, thereby learning the nonlinear relationship between samples. Additionally, a fused similarity hash based on anchor graph is proposed to generate discriminative binary hash codes for multi-modal reconstructed data. This allows sample fused similarity to be effectively modeled by a fusion similarity matrix based on anchor graph while modal correlation can be approximated by Hamming distance. Especially, extracted features from the multi-modal data are classified using deep sparse autoencoders classifier. Finally, experiments conduct on the AD Neuroimaging Initiative database show that DS-FSH outperforms comparable methods of AD classification. To conclude, DS-FSH identifies multi-modal features closely associated with AD, which are expected to contribute significantly to understanding of the pathogenesis of AD.

Feature selection is a critical component of data mining and has garnered significant attention in recent years. However, feature selection methods based on information entropy often introduce complex mutual information forms to measure features, leading to increased redundancy and potential errors. To address this issue, we propose FSCME, a feature selection method combining Copula correlation (Ccor) and the maximum information coefficient (MIC) by entropy weights. The FSCME takes into consideration the relevance between features and labels, as well as the redundancy among candidate features and selected features. Therefore, the FSCME utilizes Ccor to measure the redundancy between features, while also estimating the relevance between features and labels. Meanwhile, the FSCME employs MIC to enhance the credibility of the correlation between features and labels. Moreover, this study employs the Entropy Weight Method (EWM) to evaluate and assign weights to the Ccor and MIC. The experimental results demonstrate that FSCME yields a more effective feature subset for subsequent clustering processes, significantly improving the classification performance compared to the other six feature selection methods.

Determining microRNA (miRNA)-disease associations (MDAs) is an integral part in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of complex diseases. However, wet experiments to discern MDAs are inefficient and expensive. Hence, the development of reliable and efficient data integrative models for predicting MDAs is of significant meaning. In the present work, a novel deep learning method for predicting MDAs through deep autoencoder with multiple kernel learning (DAEMKL) is presented. Above all, DAEMKL applies multiple kernel learning (MKL) in miRNA space and disease space to construct miRNA similarity network and disease similarity network, respectively. Then, for each disease or miRNA, its feature representation is learned from the miRNA similarity network and disease similarity network via the regression model. After that, the integrated miRNA feature representation and disease feature representation are input into deep autoencoder (DAE). Furthermore, the novel MDAs are predicted through reconstruction error. Ultimately, the AUC results show that DAEMKL achieves outstanding performance. In addition, case studies of three complex diseases further prove that DAEMKL has excellent predictive performance and can discover a large number of underlying MDAs. On the whole, our method DAEMKL is an effective method to identify MDAs.

Neuroimaging genetics is a powerful technique for discovering the relationships between genotype and imaging phenotype. However, many univariate or multivariate regression approaches have only focused on imaging quantitative traits (QTs) that are relevant to some genetic markers on distinct pathways and might not be disease specific. In addition, there are complex relations between subjects of distinct modalities and diagnosis labels, which contain useful information for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Here, a novel probability connectivity-based penalty is developed for incorporating the prior information to explore relations among different subjects with disease status. Specifically, the Pearson’s correlation coefficient (PCC) is used to construct a similarity matrix in a probability graph, first to express the connectivity weights between subjects, which can reflect the different correlations among subjects within the same class. Second, a diagnosis-aligned probability connectivity-based multimodal regression (DPCMR) method is employed to find the relations among modalities of distinct subjects. It also mines associations between genetic markers and imaging phenotypes. The AD risk single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) APOE rs429358 and three modalities of neuroimaging data are used to verify the performance of all of the methods. The experimental results reveal that DPCMR has better performance and identifies some brain regions across multiple modalities related to diseases.

Individuals with the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) go through multiple stages from health to illness. The pathogenesis of AD remains uncertain, and there may be different biomarkers in different diagnostic groups. In the field of brain imaging genetics, it has become a significance challenge to utilize the brain genotype-phenotype correlations to probe the pathogenesis of AD. To solve these problems, a novel approach named bi-multitask regularized sparse canonical correlation analysis and logistic regression (BRSCCALR) is proposed, which can identify AD related biomarkers and classify subjects. Specifically, multitask sparse canonical correlation analysis focuses on learning genotype-phenotype associations. Yet the newly constructed multitask regularized logistic regression that prevents overfitting is responsible for identifying diagnosis-specific biomarkers. In addition, the connectivity-based penalty term is also introduced to enrich the prior information and enhance the biological significance of the method. Under the five-fold cross-validation experiment, the proposed method is compared with several state-of-the-art methods on a real brain imaging genetic dataset. The canonical correlation coefficients demonstrate that BRSCCALR method achieves outstanding performance. Finally, the learned biomarkers are applied to the classification experiment, and results show that the biomarkers are valid.

The exploration of single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology generates a new perspective to analyze biological problems. One of the major applications of scRNA-seq data is to discover subtypes of cells by cell clustering. Nevertheless, it is challengeable for traditional methods to handle scRNA-seq data with high level of technical noise and notorious dropouts. To better analyze single cell data, a novel scRNA-seq data analysis model called Maximum correntropy criterion based Non-negative and Low Rank Representation (MccNLRR) is introduced. Specifically, the maximum correntropy criterion, as an effective loss function, is more robust to the high noise and large outliers existed in the data. Moreover, the low rank representation is proven to be a powerful tool for capturing the global and local structures of data. Therefore, some important information, such as the similarity of cells in the subspace, is also extracted by it. Then, an iterative algorithm on the basis of the half-quadratic optimization and alternating direction method is developed to settle the complex optimization problem. Before the experiment, we also analyze the convergence and robustness of MccNLRR. At last, the results of cell clustering, visualization analysis, and gene markers selection on scRNA-seq data reveal that MccNLRR method can distinguish cell subtypes accurately and robustly.

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) as a powerful dimension reduction tool, which is widely used in the bioinformatics field. However, the loss function of conventional NMF is sensitive to non-Gaussian noise and outliers. In addition, NMF-based algorithm overlooks the geometric structure of high dimensional data. To improve the robustness of NMF, we propose a novel method called Sparse Hyper-graph regularized Non-negative Matrix Factorization by Maximizing Correntropy (SHNMF-MCC) in this paper. Specifically, the maximum correntropy criterion replaces the Euclidean distance in the loss term of SHNMF-MCC, which can filter out the noise with large outliers. Moreover, the high-order geometric structure in more sample points is completely preserved in the low-dimensional manifold through the hyper-graph regularization. Meanwhile, the sparse constraint is applied to the loss function to reduce matrix complexity and analysis difficulty. Then, the complex optimization problem can be solved by a half-quadratic (HQ) optimization approach. Before carrying out experiments, we analyze the convergence of SHNMF-MCC. Sample clustering experiments on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data and single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data verify that the proposed method is more robust and effective than other similar robust approaches.

BACKGROUND: With the rapid development of various advanced biotechnologies, researchers in related fields have realized that microRNAs (miRNAs) play critical roles in many serious human diseases. However, experimental identification of new miRNA-disease associations (MDAs) is expensive and time-consuming. Practitioners have shown growing interest in methods for predicting potential MDAs. In recent years, an increasing number of computational methods for predicting novel MDAs have been developed, making a huge contribution to the research of human diseases and saving considerable time. In this paper, we proposed an efficient computational method, named bipartite graph-based collaborative matrix factorization (BGCMF), which is highly advantageous for predicting novel MDAs. RESULTS: By combining two improved recommendation methods, a new model for predicting MDAs is generated. Based on the idea that some new miRNAs and diseases do not have any associations, we adopt the bipartite graph based on the collaborative matrix factorization method to complete the prediction. The BGCMF achieves a desirable result, with AUC of up to 0.9514 ± (0.0007) in the five-fold cross-validation experiments. CONCLUSIONS: Five-fold cross-validation is used to evaluate the capabilities of our method. Simulation experiments are implemented to predict new MDAs. More importantly, the AUC value of our method is higher than those of some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, many associations between new miRNAs and new diseases are successfully predicted by performing simulation experiments, indicating that BGCMF is a useful method to predict more potential miRNAs with roles in various diseases.

The rapid development of single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has made it possible to study the association between cells and genes at molecular resolution. When the follow-up analysis is carried out, it is often difficult to extract the cell information in high-dimensional space because of the high gene dimension in single-cell sequencing, which leads to inaccurate results in the follow-up analysis. To solve the problem, we propose a method called locally manifold non-negative matrix factorization based on centroid for scRNA-seq data analysis (MNMFC). MNMFC is a similarity modeling scheme based on locally manifold, which can map cell association in high dimensional space. Through similarity learning based on locally manifold and non-negative matrix decomposition (NMF) algorithm, the data in high-dimensional space can be mapped to low-dimensional space, which provides help for downstream clustering analysis. The performance of the model was validated experimentally on 10 scRNA-seq datasets. Compared with other nine advanced single-cell clustering methods, whether it is a comprehensive analysis or an individual analysis of the dataset, MNMFC has achieved encouraging results.

BACKGROUND: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding RNAs with regulatory functions. Many studies have shown that miRNAs are closely associated with human diseases. Among the methods to explore the relationship between the miRNA and the disease, traditional methods are time-consuming and the accuracy needs to be improved. In view of the shortcoming of previous models, a method, collaborative matrix factorization based on matrix completion (MCCMF) is proposed to predict the unknown miRNA-disease associations. RESULTS: The complete matrix of the miRNA and the disease is obtained by matrix completion. Moreover, Gaussian Interaction Profile kernel is added to the miRNA functional similarity matrix and the disease semantic similarity matrix. Then the Weight K Nearest Known Neighbors method is used to pretreat the association matrix, so the model is close to the reality. Finally, collaborative matrix factorization method is applied to obtain the prediction results. Therefore, the MCCMF obtains a satisfactory result in the fivefold cross-validation, with an AUC of 0.9569 (0.0005). CONCLUSIONS: The AUC value of MCCMF is higher than other advanced methods in the fivefold cross validation experiment. In order to comprehensively evaluate the performance of MCCMF, accuracy, precision, recall and f-measure are also added. The final experimental results demonstrate that MCCMF outperforms other methods in predicting miRNA-disease associations. In the end, the effectiveness and practicability of MCCMF are further verified by researching three specific diseases.

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a dimensionality reduction approach for learning a parts-based and linear representation of non-negative data. It has attracted more attention because of that. In practice, NMF not only neglects the manifold structure of data samples, but also overlooks the priori label information of different classes. In this paper, a novel matrix decomposition method called Hyper-graph regularized Constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization (HCNMF) is proposed for selecting differentially expressed genes and tumor sample classification. The advantage of hyper-graph learning is to capture local spatial information in high dimensional data. This method incorporates a hyper-graph regularization constraint to consider the higher order data sample relationships. The application of hyper-graph theory can effectively find pathogenic genes in cancer datasets. Besides, the label information is further incorporated in the objective function to improve the discriminative ability of the decomposition matrix. Supervised learning with label information greatly improves the classification effect. We also provide the iterative update rules and convergence proofs for the optimization problems of HCNMF. Experiments under The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) datasets confirm the superiority of HCNMF algorithm compared with other representative algorithms through a set of evaluations.