TY - JOUR T1 - Precursor microRNA Identification Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/414656 SP - 414656 AU - Binh Thanh Do AU - Vladimir Golkov AU - Göktuğ Erce Gürel AU - Daniel Cremers Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/16/414656.abstract N2 - Precursor microRNA (pre-miRNA) identification is the basis for identifying microRNAs (miRNAs), which have important roles in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method to identify whether a small non-coding RNA sequence is a pre-miRNA or not. We outperform state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets, namely the human, cross-species, and new datasets. The key of our method is to use a matrix representation of predicted secondary structure as input to a 2D convolutional network. The neural network extracts optimized features automatically instead of using a large number of handcrafted features as most existing methods do. Code and results are available at https://github.com/peace195/miRNA-identification-conv2D. ER -