ABSTRACT
MicroRNA (miRNA) is a family of endogenous single-stranded RNA about 22 nucleotides in length. Through targeting 3' UTR of message RNA (mRNA), they play important roles in post-transcriptional regulatory functions. For further research of miRNA function, the identification of more miRNA positive targets is needed urgently. Aiming at the high-dimensional small sample data sets in miRNA target prediction, an algorithm of eliminating redundant features is proposed based on v-SVM in this paper, and classification and features selection are also fused. The algorithm of eliminating redundant features optimizes the combination of features, and then constructs the best features combination which can represent miRNA and targets interaction model. The prior parameter v (0 < u < or = 1) controls the compression proportion of data set and selects more distinguishing support vectors. Finally, the classifier model of miRNA target prediction is built. The unbiased assessment of the classifier is achieved with a completely independent test dataset. Experiment results indicated that in both classification recognition and generalization performance of miRNA targets predicition, this model was superior to the present machine learning algorithms such as miTarget, NBmiRTar and TargetMiner, etc.