Fig 1. An example of the network model in the study.

miRNA X was known to target the pathways P1 and P2; miRNA Y, on the other hand, was related to the pathways P2, P5 and P8. The pathway based network model helped us to connect miRNA X and miRNA Y through their common pathway P2. The weight of the edge between miRNA X and miRNA Y was set to be one, since they shared one single pathway. The corresponding significance value was calculated using hypergeometric distribution for each miRNA pair. The less significant miRNA pairs with p-value larger than 0.05 were filtered out of the network.