Precursor microRNA (pre-miRNA) identification is the basis for identifying microRNAs (miRNAs), which have important roles in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method to identify whether a small non-coding RNA sequence is a pre-miRNA or not. We outperform state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets, namely the human, cross-species, and new datasets. The key of our method is to use a matrix representation of predicted secondary structure as input to a 2D convolutional network. The neural network extracts optimized features automatically instead of using the enormous number of handcrafted features as most of existing methods do. Code and results are available at https://github.com/peace195/miRNA-identification-conv2D.     «

Precursor microRNA (pre-miRNA) identification is the basis for identifying microRNAs (miRNAs), which have important roles in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method to identify whether a small non-coding RNA sequence is a pre-miRNA or not. We outperform state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets, namely the human, cross-species, and new datasets. The key of our method is to use a matrix representation of predicted secondary s...     »