Prediction of microRNAs involved in immune system diseases through network based features

•We present an immune miRNA classifier based on novel network and motif features.•Our integrated approach aims to discriminate immune miRNAs from non-immune miRNAs.•The combined network, motif, sequence and structure features provides better accuracy.•The proposed method can be used to discriminate immune miRNAs with better accuracy.

MicroRNAs are a class of small non-coding regulatory RNA molecules that modulate the expression of several genes at post-transcriptional level and play a vital role in disease pathogenesis. Recent research shows that a range of miRNAs are involved in the regulation of immunity and its deregulation results in immune mediated diseases such as cancer, inflammation and autoimmune diseases. Computational discovery of these immune miRNAs using a set of specific features is highly desirable. In the current investigation, we present a SVM based classification system which uses a set of novel network based topological and motif features in addition to the baseline sequential and structural features to predict immune specific miRNAs from other non-immune miRNAs. The classifier was trained and tested on a balanced set of equal number of positive and negative examples to show the discriminative power of our network features. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an accuracy of 90.2% and outperforms the classification accuracy of 63.2% reported using the traditional miRNA sequential and structural features. The proposed classifier was further validated with two immune disease sub-class datasets related to multiple sclerosis microarray data and psoriasis RNA-seq data with higher accuracy. These results indicate that our classifier which uses network and motif features along with sequential and structural features will lead to significant improvement in classifying immune miRNAs and hence can be applied to identify other specific classes of miRNAs as an extensible miRNA classification system.

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