Inferring the miRNA-disease associations based on domain-disease associations

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small endogenous non-coding genes, acting as regulators in the post-transcriptional processes. Recently, miRNAs are found to be widely involved in different types of diseases. Therefore, identification of disease associated miRNAs can help understand the mechanisms that underlie the disease and identify new biomarkers. However, it is not easy to identify the miRNAs related to diseases due to its extensive involvements in various biological processes. In this work, we present a new approach to identify disease associated miRNAs based on domains, the functional and structural blocks of proteins. The results on real datasets demonstrate that our method can effectively identify disease related miRNAs with high precision