MCNN: multiple convolutional neural networks for RNA-protein binding sites prediction

Computational prediction of the RBP bound sites using features learned from existing annotation knowledge is an effective method because high-throughput experiments are complex, expensive and time-consuming. Many methods have been proposed to predict RNA-protein binding sites. However, the partial information of RNA sequence is not fully used. In this study, we propose multiple convolutional neural networks (MCNN) method, which predicts RNA-protein binding sites by integrating multiple convolutional neural networks constructed by RNA sequence information extracted from windows with different lengths. First, MCNN trains multiple CNNs base on RNA sequences extracted by different window lengths. Second, MCNN can extract more binding patterns of RBPs by combining these trained multiple CNNs previously. Third, MCNN only uses RNA base sequence information for RNA-protein binding sites prediction, which extracts sequence binding features and predicts the result with same architecture. This avoids the information loss of feature extraction step. Our proposed MCNN demonstrates a competitive performance comparing with other methods on a large-scale dataset derived from CLIP-seq, which is an effective method for RNA-protein binding sites prediction. The source code of our proposed MCNN method can be found in https://github.com/biomg/MCNN.