Class similarity network for coding and long non-coding RNA classification

BACKGROUND: Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play significant roles in varieties of physiological and pathological processes.The premise of the lncRNA functional study is that the lncRNAs are identified correctly. Recently, deep learning method like convolutional neural network (CNN) has been successfully applied to identify the lncRNAs. However, the traditional CNN considers little relationships among samples via an indirect way. RESULTS: Inspired by the Siamese Neural Network (SNN), here we propose a novel network named Class Similarity Network in coding RNA and lncRNA classification. Class Similarity Network considers more relationships among input samples in a direct way. It focuses on exploring the potential relationships between input samples and samples from both the same class and the different classes. To achieve this, Class Similarity Network trains the parameters specific to each class to obtain the high-level features and represents the general similarity to each class in a node. The comparison results on the validation dataset under the same conditions illustrate the superiority of our Class Similarity Network to the baseline CNN. Besides, our method performs effectively and achieves state-of-the-art performances on two test datasets. CONCLUSIONS: We construct Class Similarity Network in coding RNA and lncRNA classification, which is shown to work effectively on two different datasets by achieving accuracy, precision, and F1-score as 98.43%, 0.9247, 0.9374, and 97.54%, 0.9990, 0.9860, respectively. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-021-04517-6.