MicroRNA identification using linear dimensionality reduction with explicit feature mapping

BACKGROUND: microRNAs are a class of small RNAs, about 20 nt long, which regulate cellular processes in animals and plants. Identifying microRNAs is one of the most important tasks in gene regulation studies. The main features used for identifying these tiny molecules are those in hairpin secondary structures of pre-microRNA. RESULTS: A new classifier is employed to identify precursor microRNAs from both pseudo hairpins and other non-coding RNAs. This classifier achieves a geometric mean G(m )= 92.20% with just three features and 92.91% with seven features. CONCLUSION: This study shows that linear dimensionality reduction combined with explicit feature mapping, namely miLDR-EM, achieves high performance in classification of microRNAs from other sequences. Also, explicitly mapping data onto a high dimensional space could be a useful alternative to kernel-based methods for large datasets with a small number of features. Moreover, we demonstrate that microRNAs can be accurately identified by just using three properties that involve minimum free energy.