Import Edgelist from CSV Neo4J - neo4j

Question

i'm trying to make a graph database from an edgelist and i'm kind of new with neo4j so i have this problem. First of all, the edgelist i got is like this:
geneId geneSymbol diseaseId diseaseName score
10 NAT2 C0005695 Bladder Neoplasm 0.245871429880008
10 NAT2 C0013182 Drug Allergy 0.202681755307501
100 ADA C0002170 Alopecia 0.2
100 ADA C0002880 Autoimmune hemolytic anemia 0.2
100 ADA C0004096 Asthma 0.21105290517153
i have a lot of relationships like that (165k) between gen and diseases associated.
I want to make a bipartite network in which nodes are gen or diseases, so i upload the data like this:
LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "file:///path/curated_gene_disease_associations.tsv" as row FIELDTERMINATOR '\t'
MERGE (g:Gene{geneId:row.geneId})
ON CREATE SET g.geneSymbol = row.geneSymbol
MERGE (d:Disease{diseaseId:row.diseaseId})
ON CREATE SET d.diseaseName = row.diseaseName
after a while (which is way longer than what it takes in R to upload the nodes using igraph), it's done and i got the nodes, i used MERGE because i don't want to repeat the gen/disease. The problem is that i don't know how to make the relationships, i've searched and they always use something like
MATCH (g:Gene {geneId: toInt(row.geneId)}), (d:Disease {diseaseId: toInt(row.geneId)})
CREATE (g)-[:RELATED_TO]->(d);
But when i run it it says that there are no changes. I've seen the neo4j tutorial but when they do the relations they don't work with edgelists so maybe the problem is when i merge the nodes so they don't repeat. I'd appreciate any help!

Answer 1

Looks like there might be two problems with your relationship query:
1) You're inserting (probably) as a string type (no toInt), and doing the MATCH query as an integer type (with toInt).
2) You're MATCHing the Disease node on row.geneId, not row.diseaseId.
Try the following modification:
MATCH (g:Gene {geneId: row.geneId}), (d:Disease {diseaseId: row.diseaseId})
CREATE (g)-[:RELATED_TO]->(d);

Answer 2

#DanielKitchener's answer seems to address your main question.
With respect to the slowness of creating the nodes, you should create indexes (or uniqueness constraints, which automatically create indexes as well) on these label/property pairs:
:Gene(geneId)
:Disease(diseaseId)
For example, execute these 2 statements separately:
CREATE INDEX ON :Gene(geneId);
CREATE INDEX ON :Disease(diseaseId);
Once the DB has those indexes, your MERGE clauses should be much faster, as they would not have to scan through all existing Gene or Disease nodes to find possible matches.