WVDL: Weighted Voting Deep Learning Model for Predicting RNA-Protein Binding Sites

Abstract

RNA-binding proteins are important for the process of cell life activities. High-throughput technique experimental method to discover RNA-protein binding sites is time-consuming and expensive. Deep learning is an effective theory for predicting RNA-protein binding sites. Using weighted voting method to integrate multiple basic classifier models can improve model performance. Thus, in our study, we propose a weighted voting deep learning model (WVDL), which uses weighted voting method to combine convolutional neural network (CNN), long short term memory network (LSTM) and residual network (ResNet). First, the final forecast result of WVDL outperforms the basic classifier models and other ensemble strategies. Second, WVDL can extract more effective features by using weighted voting to find the best weighted combination. And, the CNN model also can draw the predicted motif pictures. Third, WVDL gets a competitive experiment result on public RBP-24 datasets comparing with other state-of-the-art methods. The source code of our proposed WVDL can be found in https://github.com/biomg/WVDL .