Refined Identification of miRNA-Disease Associations Based on Knowledge-awareness Propagation

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs orchestrating regulatory networks through sequence-specific target recognition. Understanding miRNA-disease correlations is crucial as high-throughput sequencing data growth outpaces experimental validation, necessitating computational approaches for association discovery. Existing frameworks model miRNA-disease interactions as uniform binary relationships, overlooking semantic diversity in different association mechanisms. We propose BKAMDA (MiRNA-Disease Associations prediction Based on Knowledge-Awareness), a novel knowledge-aware model for predicting miRNA-disease associations. Unlike existing methods learning only from miRNA-disease networks, BKAMDA leverages knowledge graphs to delineate distinct association types. By simulating informational propagation within knowledge graphs across diverse miRNA-disease relationships, the model investigates latent connections across various relationship types. Comparative analysis with competitive baselines using real-world experimentally validated datasets demonstrates excellent performance across multiple metrics. Three disease case studies further confirm model accuracy and effectiveness for precision medicine applications. Our knowledge-aware approach significantly advances miRNA-disease association prediction by capturing semantic diversity in biological interactions.