A novel method to measure the semantic similarity of HPO terms

Abstract

It is critical yet remains to be challenging to make precise disease diagnosis from complex clinical features and highly heterogeneous genetic background. Recently, phenotype similarity has been effectively applied to model patient phenotype data. However, the existing measurements are revised based on the Gene Ontology-based term similarity models, which are not optimised for human phenotype ontologies. We propose a new similarity measure called PhenoSim. Our model includes a noise reduction component to model the noisy patient phenotype data, and a path-constrained Information Content-based method for phenotype semantics similarity measurement. Evaluation tests compared PhenoSim with four existing approaches. It showed that PhenoSim, could effectively improve the performance of HPO-based phenotype similarity measurement, thus increasing the accuracy of phenotype-based causative gene prediction and disease prediction.