Computational Prediction of lncRNA-Protein Interactions using Machine learning

Long non-coding RNAs have generated much scientific interest because of their functional significance in regulating various biological processes and also their dysfunction has been implicated in disease progression. LncRNAs usually bind with proteins to perform their function. The experimental approaches for identifying these interactions are time taking and expensive. Lately, numerous method on predicting lncRNA-protein interactions have been reported yet, they all have some prevalent drawbacks that limit their prediction performance. In this research, we proposed a computational method based on a similarity scheme that integrates features derived from sequence and structure similarities. When compared with the state of the art, the proposed method has achieved highest performance with accuracy and F1 measure of 98.6% and 98.7% using XGBoost as classifier. Our results showed that by combining sequence and structure based features the lncRNA protein interactions can be better predicted and can also complement the experimental techniques for this task.