Ying Ju

Prediction of MicroRNA-Disease Associations Based on Social Network Analysis Methods

MicroRNAs constitute an important class of noncoding, single-stranded, ~22 nucleotide long RNA molecules encoded by endogenous genes. They play an important role in regulating gene transcription and the regulation of normal development. MicroRNAs can be associated with disease; however, only a few microRNA-disease associations have been confirmed by traditional experimental approaches. We introduce two methods to predict microRNA-disease association. The first method, KATZ, focuses on integrating the social network analysis method with machine learning and is based on networks derived from known microRNA-disease associations, disease-disease associations, and microRNA-microRNA associations. The other method, CATAPULT, is a supervised machine learning method. We applied the two methods to 242 known microRNA-disease associations and evaluated their performance using leave-one-out cross-validation and 3-fold cross-validation. Experiments proved that our methods outperformed the state-of-the-art methods.

Pretata: predicting TATA binding proteins with novel features and dimensionality reduction strategy

BackgroundIt is necessary and essential to discovery protein function from the novel primary sequences. Wet lab experimental procedures are not only time-consuming, but also costly, so predicting protein structure and function reliably based only on amino acid sequence has significant value. TATA-binding protein (TBP) is a kind of DNA binding protein, which plays a key role in the transcription regulation. Our study proposed an automatic approach for identifying TATA-binding proteins efficiently, accurately, and conveniently. This method would guide for the special protein identification with computational intelligence strategies.ResultsFirstly, we proposed novel fingerprint features for TBP based on pseudo amino acid composition, physicochemical properties, and secondary structure. Secondly, hierarchical features dimensionality reduction strategies were employed to improve the performance furthermore. Currently, Pretata achieves 92.92% TATA-binding protein prediction accuracy, which is better than all other existing methods.ConclusionsThe experiments demonstrate that our method could greatly improve the prediction accuracy and speed, thus allowing large-scale NGS data prediction to be practical. A web server is developed to facilitate the other researchers, which can be accessed at http://server.malab.cn/preTata/.

Improving tRNAscan-SE Annotation Results via Ensemble Classifiers

tRNAScan‐SE is a tRNA detection program that is widely used for tRNA annotation; however, the false positive rate of tRNAScan‐SE is unacceptable for large sequences. Here, we used a machine learning method to try to improve the tRNAScan‐SE results. A new predictor, tRNA‐Predict, was designed. We obtained real and pseudo‐tRNA sequences as training data sets using tRNAScan‐SE and constructed three different tRNA feature sets. We then set up an ensemble classifier, LibMutil, to predict tRNAs from the training data. The positive data set of 623 tRNA sequences was obtained from tRNAdb 2009 and the negative data set was the false positive tRNAs predicted by tRNAscan‐SE. Our in silico experiments revealed a prediction accuracy rate of 95.1 % for tRNA‐Predict using 10‐fold cross‐validation. tRNA‐Predict was developed to distinguish functional tRNAs from pseudo‐tRNAs rather than to predict tRNAs from a genome‐wide scan. However, tRNA‐Predict can work with the output of tRNAscan‐SE, which is a genome‐wide scanning method, to improve the tRNAscan‐SE annotation results. The tRNA‐Predict web server is accessible at http://datamining.xmu.edu.cn/∼gjs/tRNA‐Predict.

Finding the Best Classification Threshold in Imbalanced Classification

Abstract Classification with imbalanced class distributions is a major problem in machine learning. Researchers have given considerable attention to the applications in many real-world scenarios. Although several works have utilized the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve to select potentially optimal classifiers in imbalanced classifications, limited studies have been devoted to finding the classification threshold for testing or unknown datasets. In general, the classification threshold is simply set to 0.5, which is usually unsuitable for an imbalanced classification. In this study, we analyze the drawbacks of using ROC as the sole measure of imbalance in data classification problems. In addition, a novel framework for finding the best classification threshold is proposed. Experiments with SCOP v.1.53 data reveal that, with the default threshold set to 0.5, our proposed framework demonstrated a 20.63% improvement in terms of F-score compared with that of more commonly used methods. The findings suggest that the proposed framework is both effective and efficient. A web server and software tools are available via http://datamining.xmu.edu.cn/prht/ or http://prht.sinaapp.com/ .

Prediction of G Protein-Coupled Receptors with SVM-Prot Features and Random Forest.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the largest receptor superfamily. In this paper, we try to employ physical-chemical properties, which come from SVM-Prot, to represent GPCR. Random Forest was utilized as classifier for distinguishing them from other protein sequences. MEME suite was used to detect the most significant 10 conserved motifs of human GPCRs. In the testing datasets, the average accuracy was 91.61%, and the average AUC was 0.9282. MEME discovery analysis showed that many motifs aggregated in the seven hydrophobic helices transmembrane regions adapt to the characteristic of GPCRs. All of the above indicate that our machine-learning method can successfully distinguish GPCRs from non-GPCRs.

Complex Network Clustering by a Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition and Membrane Structure

The field of complex network clustering is gaining considerable attention in recent years. In this study, a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on membranes is proposed to solve the network clustering problem. Population are divided into different membrane structures on average. The evolutionary algorithm is carried out in the membrane structures. The population are eliminated by the vector of membranes. In the proposed method, two evaluation objectives termed as Kernel J-means and Ratio Cut are to be minimized. Extensive experimental studies comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms proves that the proposed algorithm is effective and promising.

Accurate Identification of Cancerlectins through Hybrid Machine Learning Technology

Cancerlectins are cancer-related proteins that function as lectins. They have been identified through computational identification techniques, but these techniques have sometimes failed to identify proteins because of sequence diversity among the cancerlectins. Advanced machine learning identification methods, such as support vector machine and basic sequence features (n-gram), have also been used to identify cancerlectins. In this study, various protein fingerprint features and advanced classifiers, including ensemble learning techniques, were utilized to identify this group of proteins. We improved the prediction accuracy of the original feature extraction methods and classification algorithms by more than 10% on average. Our work provides a basis for the computational identification of cancerlectins and reveals the power of hybrid machine learning techniques in computational proteomics.

Resistance gene identification from Larimichthys crocea with machine learning techniques

The research on resistance genes (R-gene) plays a vital role in bioinformatics as it has the capability of coping with adverse changes in the external environment, which can form the corresponding resistance protein by transcription and translation. It is meaningful to identify and predict R-gene of Larimichthys crocea (L.Crocea). It is friendly for breeding and the marine environment as well. Large amounts of L.Crocea’s immune mechanisms have been explored by biological methods. However, much about them is still unclear. In order to break the limited understanding of the L.Crocea’s immune mechanisms and to detect new R-gene and R-gene-like genes, this paper came up with a more useful combination prediction method, which is to extract and classify the feature of available genomic data by machine learning. The effectiveness of feature extraction and classification methods to identify potential novel R-gene was evaluated, and different statistical analyzes were utilized to explore the reliability of prediction method, which can help us further understand the immune mechanisms of L.Crocea against pathogens. In this paper, a webserver called LCRG-Pred is available at http://server.malab.cn/rg_lc/.

Sc-ncDNAPred: A Sequence-Based Predictor for Identifying Non-coding DNA in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

With the rapid development of high-speed sequencing technologies and the implementation of many whole genome sequencing project, research in the genomics is advancing from genome sequencing to genome synthesis. Synthetic biology technologies such as DNA-based molecular assemblies, genome editing technology, directional evolution technology and DNA storage technology, and other cutting-edge technologies emerge in succession. Especially the rapid growth and development of DNA assembly technology may greatly push forward the success of artificial life. Meanwhile, DNA assembly technology needs a large number of target sequences of known information as data support. Non-coding DNA (ncDNA) sequences occupy most of the organism genomes, thus accurate recognizing of them is necessary. Although experimental methods have been proposed to detect ncDNA sequences, they are expensive for performing genome wide detections. Thus, it is necessary to develop machine-learning methods for predicting non-coding DNA sequences. In this study, we collected the ncDNA benchmark dataset of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and reported a support vector machine-based predictor, called Sc-ncDNAPred, for predicting ncDNA sequences. The optimal feature extraction strategy was selected from a group included mononucleotide, dimer, trimer, tetramer, pentamer, and hexamer, using support vector machine learning method. Sc-ncDNAPred achieved an overall accuracy of 0.98. For the convenience of users, an online web-server has been built at: http://server.malab.cn/Sc_ncDNAPred/index.jsp.