EMDL_m6Am: identifying N6,2′-O-dimethyladenosine sites based on stacking ensemble deep learning

BACKGROUND: N6, 2'-O-dimethyladenosine (m(6)Am) is an abundant RNA methylation modification on vertebrate mRNAs and is present in the transcription initiation region of mRNAs. It has recently been experimentally shown to be associated with several human disorders, including obesity genes, and stomach cancer, among others. As a result, N6,2′-O-dimethyladenosine (m(6)Am) site will play a crucial part in the regulation of RNA if it can be correctly identified. RESULTS: This study proposes a novel deep learning-based m(6)Am prediction model, EMDL_m6Am, which employs one-hot encoding to expressthe feature map of the RNA sequence and recognizes m(6)Am sites by integrating different CNN models via stacking. Including DenseNet, Inflated Convolutional Network (DCNN) and Deep Multiscale Residual Network (MSRN), the sensitivity (Sn), specificity (Sp), accuracy (ACC), Mathews correlation coefficient (MCC) and area under the curve (AUC) of our model on the training data set reach 86.62%, 88.94%, 87.78%, 0.7590 and 0.8778, respectively, and the prediction results on the independent test set are as high as 82.25%, 79.72%, 80.98%, 0.6199, and 0.8211. CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, the experimental results demonstrated that EMDL_m6Am greatly improved the predictive performance of the m(6)Am sites and could provide a valuable reference for the next part of the study. The source code and experimental data are available at: https://github.com/13133989982/EMDL-m6Am.