MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules composed of 19-22 nt playing important regulatory roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation by inhibiting the translation of the mRNA into proteins or otherwise cleaving the target mRNA. Inferring miRNA targets provides useful information for understanding the roles of miRNA involving in biological processes which may result in diagnosing complex diseases. Statistical methodologies of point estimates such as the LASSO algorithm have been proposed to identify the interactions of miRNA and mRNA based on sequence and expression data. In this paper, we propose Bayesian LASSO and non-negative Bayesian LASSO to analyze the interactions between miRNA and mRNA using the expression data. The proposed Bayesian methods explore the posterior distributions for those parameters required in the model depicting the miRNA-mRNA interactions.  For comparison purposes, we applied the Least Square Regression (LSR), Ridge Regression (RR), LASSO, non-negative LASSO (nLASSO), and the Bayesian approaches to four public data sets which have the known interaction pairs of miRNA and mRNA. Comparing to the point estimate algorithms,  the Bayesian methods are able to infer more known interactions and are more meaningful to provide credible intervals to take into account the uncertainty of the interactions of miRNA and mRNA. The Bayesian approaches are useful for graphing the inferred effects of the miRNAs on the targets by plotting the posterior distributions of those parameters, and while the point estimate algorithm only provides a single estimate for those parameters .
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules composed of 19-22 nt , which play important regulatory roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation by inhibiting the translation of the mRNA into proteins or otherwise cleaving the target mRNA. Inferring miRNA targets provides useful information for understanding the roles of miRNA in biological processes that are potentially involved in complex diseases. Statistical methodologies for point estimation, such as the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) algorithm, have been proposed to identify the interactions of miRNA and mRNA based on sequence and expression data. In this paper, we propose using the Bayesian LASSO (BLASSO) and the non-negative Bayesian LASSO (nBLASSO) to analyse the interactions between miRNA and mRNA using expression data. The proposed Bayesian methods explore the posterior distributions for those parameters required to model the miRNA-mRNA interactions. These approaches can be used to observe the inferred effects of the miRNAs on the targets by plotting the posterior distributions of those parameters. For comparison purposes, the Least Squares Regression (LSR), Ridge Regression (RR), LASSO, non-negative LASSO (nLASSO), and the proposed Bayesian approaches were applied to four public datasets. We concluded that nLASSO and nBLASSO perform best in terms of sensitivity and specificity. Compared to the point estimate algorithms, which only provide single estimates for those parameters, the Bayesian methods are more meaningful and provide credible intervals , which take into account the uncertainty of the inferred interactions of the miRNA and mRNA. Furthermore, Bayesian methods naturally provide statistical significance to select convincing inferred interactions, while point estimate algorithms require a manually chosen threshold, which is less meaningful, to choose the possible interactions .
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