To Örebro University

In silico prediction of novel miRNAs from genomic sequences remains a challenging problem. This study presents a genome-wide miRNA discovery software package called GenoScan and evaluates two hairpin classification methods. These methods, one ensemble-based and one using logistic regression were benchmarked along with 15 published methods. In addition, the sequence-folding step is addressed by investigating the impact of secondary structure prediction methods and the choice of input sequence length on prediction performance. Both the accuracy of secondary structure predictions and the miRNA prediction are evaluated. In the benchmark of hairpin classification methods, the regression model achieved highest classification accuracy. Of the structure prediction methods evaluated, ContextFold achieved the highest agreement between predicted and experimentally determined structures. However, both the choice of secondary structure prediction method and input sequence length had limited impact on hairpin classification performance.

We present a novel machine learning approach for the classification of cancer samples using expression data. We refer to the method as "decision trunks," since it is loosely based on decision trees, but contains several modifications designed to achieve an algorithm that: (1) produces smaller and more easily interpretable classifiers than decision trees; (2) is more robust in varying application scenarios; and (3) achieves higher classification accuracy. The decision trunk algorithm has been implemented and tested on 26 classification tasks, covering a wide range of cancer forms, experimental methods, and classification scenarios. This comprehensive evaluation indicates that the proposed algorithm performs at least as well as the current state of the art algorithms in terms of accuracy, while producing classifiers that include on average only 2-3 markers. We suggest that the resulting decision trunks have clear advantages over other classifiers due to their transparency, interpretability, and their correspondence with human decision-making and clinical testing practices.