Constructing the boundary between potent and ineffective siRNAs by MG-algorithm with C-features

BACKGROUND: In siRNA based antiviral therapeutics, selection of potent siRNAs is an indispensable step, but these commonly used features are unable to construct the boundary between potent and ineffective siRNAs. RESULTS: Here, we select potent siRNAs by removing ineffective ones, where these conditions for removals are constructed by C-features of siRNAs, C-features are generated by MG-algorithm, Icc-cluster and the different combinations of some commonly used features, MG-algorithm and Icc-cluster are two different algorithms to search the nearest siRNA neighbors. For the ineffective siRNAs in test data, they are removed from test data by I-iteration, where I-iteration continually updates training data by adding these successively removed siRNAs. Furthermore, the efficacy of siRNAs of test data is predicted by their nearest neighbors of training data. CONCLUSIONS: By siRNAs of Hencken dataset, results show that our algorithm removes almost ineffective siRNAs from test data, gives the clear boundary between potent and ineffective siRNAs, and accurately predicts the efficacy of siRNAs also. We suggest that our algorithm can provide new insights for selecting the potent siRNAs. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-022-04867-9.