MiRTif: a support vector machine-based microRNA target interaction filter

Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a set of small non-coding RNAs serving as important negative gene regulators. In animals, miRNAs turn down protein translation by binding to the 3' UTR regions of target genes with imperfect complementary pairing. The identification of microRNA targets has become one of the major challenges of miRNA research. Bioinformatics investigations on miRNA target have resulted in a number of target prediction tools. Although these tools are capable of predicting hundreds of targets for a given miRNA, many of them suffer from high false positive rates, indicating the need for a post-processing filter for the predicted targets. Once trained with experimentally validated true and false targets, machine learning methods appear to be ideal approaches to distinguish the true targets from the false ones. Results: We present a miRNA target filtering system named MiRTif (miRNA:target interaction filter). The system is a support vector machine (SVM) classifier tra...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Yuchen Yang, Yu-Ping Wang, Kuo-Bin Li
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, MiRNA, Mirna Target, Target Prediction