Using Base Pairing Probabilities for MiRNA Recognition

We designed a new SVM for microRNA identification, whose novelty consist in the fact that many of its features incorporate the base-pairing probabilities provided by McCaskill´s algorithm. Comparisons with other SVMs for microRNA identification prove that our SVM obtains competitive results. One of the advantages of our approach is that it makes no use of so-called normalised features which are based on sequence shuffling, which is a sensitive issue from the biological point of view. This also makes our approach much less time consuming.