MAMLCDA: A Meta-Learning Model for Predicting circRNA-Disease Association Based on MAML Combined with CNN

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) exist in vivo and are a class of noncoding RNA molecules. They have a single-stranded, closed, annular structure. Many studies have shown that circRNAs and diseases are linked. Therefore, it is critical to build a reliable and accurate predictor to find the circRNA-disease association. In this paper, we presented a meta-learning model named MAMLCDA to identify the circRNA-disease association, which is based on model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) combined with CNN classification. Specifically, similarities between diseases and circRNAs are extracted and integrated to characterize their relationships, and k-means is used to cluster majority samples and select a certain number of samples from each cluster to obtain the same number of negative samples as the positive samples. To further reduce the dimension of the features and save operation time, we applied probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) to compact the integrated circRNA and disease similarity network feature vectors. The feature vectors are converted into images. At this time, the prediction problem is transformed into the 2-way 1-shot problem of the image and input into the model with MAML as the meta-learner and CNN as the base-learner. Comparison results of five-fold cross-validation on two benchmark datasets illustrate that MAMLCDA outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches with the best accuracies of 95.33% and 98%. Therefore, MAMLCDA can help to understand the pathogenesis of complex diseases at the circRNA level.