A Meta-Path-Based Prediction Method for Disease Comorbidities

Abstract

The simultaneous presence of diseases worsens the prognosis of patients and makes their treatment difficult. Identifying the co-occurrence of diseases is key to improving the situation of patients and designing effective therapeutic strategies. On the one hand, the increasing availability of clinical information opens new ways to unveil hidden relationships between diseases. On the other hand, heterogeneous information networks have been used in recent years to discover novel knowledge from disease data, including symptoms, genes or drugs. The use of meta-paths allows the complex semantics of the relationships between the different types of nodes to be included in heterogeneous networks. In this study, we propose a system to predict disease comorbidities through the use of meta-paths in a heterogeneous network of diseases and symptoms, built from textual sources of public access. The results obtained improve those of similar studies based on biological data, and the predictions calculated for diabetes and Crohn s disease are supported by medical literature. Both the used data and the obtained prediction model are publicly accessible.