Deep neural networks for human microRNA precursor detection.

Journal: BMC bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in a variety of biological processes by regulating gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. So, the discovery of new miRNAs has become a popular task in biological research. Since the experimental identification of miRNAs is time-consuming, many computational tools have been developed to identify miRNA precursor (pre-miRNA). Most of these computation methods are based on traditional machine learning methods and their performance depends heavily on the selected features which are usually determined by domain experts. To develop easily implemented methods with better performance, we investigated different deep learning architectures for the pre-miRNAs identification.

Authors

  • Xueming Zheng
    Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, School of Medicine, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China. biozxm@163.com.
  • Xingli Fu
    Jiangsu University Health Science Center, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China.
  • Kaicheng Wang
    Department of Biostatistics, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut.
  • Meng Wang
    State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China.