EDLMFC: an ensemble deep learning framework with multi-scale features combination for ncRNA–protein interaction prediction

BACKGROUND: Non-coding RNA (ncRNA) and protein interactions play essential roles in various physiological and pathological processes. The experimental methods used for predicting ncRNA–protein interactions are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for computational methods to accurately and efficiently predict ncRNA–protein interactions. RESULTS: In this work, we presented an ensemble deep learning-based method, EDLMFC, to predict ncRNA–protein interactions using the combination of multi-scale features, including primary sequence features, secondary structure sequence features, and tertiary structure features. Conjoint k-mer was used to extract protein/ncRNA sequence features, integrating tertiary structure features, then fed into an ensemble deep learning model, which combined convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn dominating biological information with bi-directional long short-term memory network (BLSTM) to capture long-range dependencies among the features identified by the CNN. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods under five-fold cross-validation, EDLMFC shows the best performance with accuracy of 93.8%, 89.7%, and 86.1% on RPI1807, NPInter v2.0, and RPI488 datasets, respectively. The results of the independent test demonstrated that EDLMFC can effectively predict potential ncRNA–protein interactions from different organisms. Furtherly, EDLMFC is also shown to predict hub ncRNAs and proteins presented in ncRNA–protein networks of Mus musculus successfully. CONCLUSIONS: In general, our proposed method EDLMFC improved the accuracy of ncRNA–protein interaction predictions and anticipated providing some helpful guidance on ncRNA functions research. The source code of EDLMFC and the datasets used in this work are available at https://github.com/JingjingWang-87/EDLMFC. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-021-04069-9.