SAWRPI: A Stacking Ensemble Framework With Adaptive Weight for Predicting ncRNA-Protein Interactions Using Sequence Information

Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) take essential effects on biological processes, like gene regulation. One critical way of ncRNA executing biological functions is interactions between ncRNA and RNA binding proteins (RBPs). Identifying proteins, involving ncRNA-protein interactions, can well understand the function ncRNA. Many high-throughput experiment have been applied to recognize the interactions. As a consequence of these approaches are time- and labor-consuming, currently, a great number of computational methods have been developed to improve and advance the ncRNA-protein interactions research. However, these methods may be not available to all RNAs and proteins, particularly processing new RNAs and proteins. Additionally, most of them cannot process well with long sequence. In this work, a computational method SAWRPI is proposed to make prediction of ncRNA-protein through sequence information. More specifically, the raw features of protein and ncRNA are firstly extracted through the k-mer sparse matrix with SVD reduction and learning nucleic acid symbols by natural language processing with local fusion strategy, respectively. Then, to classify easily, Hilbert Transformation is exploited to transform raw feature data to the new feature space. Finally, stacking ensemble strategy is adopted to learn high-level abstraction features automatically and generate final prediction results. To confirm the robustness and stability, three different datasets containing two kinds of interactions are utilized. In comparison with state-of-the-art methods and other results classifying or feature extracting strategies, SAWRPI achieved high performance on three datasets, containing two kinds of lncRNA-protein interactions. Upon our finding, SAWRPI is a trustworthy, robust, yet simple and can be used as a beneficial supplement to the task of predicting ncRNA-protein interactions.

Automated summary

Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) play important roles in biological processes through interactions with RNA binding proteins (RBPs). Computational methods have been developed to predict ncRNA-protein interactions, but some of them have limited applicability. In this study, a computational method called SAWRPI is proposed to predict ncRNA-protein interactions using sequence information. The method achieved high performance in experiments, showing its potential as a reliable tool for predicting ncRNA-protein interactions.