Background As an important non-coding RNA, microRNA (miRNA) plays a significant role in a series of life processes and is closely associated with a variety ofHumandiseases. Hence, identification of potential miRNA-disease associations can make great contributions to the research and treatment ofHumandiseases. However, to our knowledge, many existing computational methods only utilize the single type of known association information between miRNAs and diseases to predict their potential associations, without focusing on their interactions or associations with other types of molecules. Results In this paper, we propose a network embedding-based method for predicting miRNA-disease associations by preserving behavior and attribute information. Firstly, a heterogeneous network is constructed by integrating known associations among miRNA, protein and disease, and the network representation method Learning Graph Representations with Global Structural Information (GraRep) is implemented to learn the behavior information of miRNAs and diseases in the network. Then, the behavior information of miRNAs and diseases is combined with the attribute information of them to represent miRNA-disease association pairs. Finally, the prediction model is established based on the Random Forest algorithm. Under the five-fold cross validation, the proposed NEMPD model obtained average 85.41% prediction accuracy with 80.96% sensitivity at the AUC of 91.58%. Furthermore, the performance of NEMPD is also validated by the case studies. Among the top 50 predicted disease-related miRNAs, 48 (breast neoplasms), 47 (colon neoplasms), 47 (lung neoplasms) were confirmed by two other databases. Conclusions The proposed NEMPD model has a good performance in predicting the potential associations between miRNAs and diseases, and has great potency in the field of miRNA-disease association prediction in the future.