Identification of small open reading frames in plant lncRNA using class-imbalance learning

Recently, small open reading frames (sORFs) in long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) have been demonstrated to encode small peptides that can help study the mechanisms of growth and development in organisms. Since machine learning-based computational methods are less costly compared with biological experiments, they can be used to identify sORFs and provide a basis for biological experiments. However, few computational methods and data resources have been exploited for identifying sORFs in plant lncRNA. Besides, machine learning models produce underperforming classifiers when faced with a class-imbalance problem. In this study, an alternative method called SMOTE based on weighted cosine distance (WCDSMOTE) which enables interaction with feature selection is put forward to synthesize minority class samples and weighted edited nearest neighbor (WENN) is applied to clean up majority class samples, thus, hybrid sampling WCDSMOTE-ENN is proposed to deal with imbalanced datasets with the multi-angle feature. A heterogeneous classifier ensemble is introduced to complete the classification task. Therefore, a novel computational method that is based on class-imbalance learning to identify the sORFs with coding potential in plant lncRNA (sORFplnc) is presented. Experimental results manifest that sORFplnc outperforms existing computational methods in identifying sORFs with coding potential. We anticipate that the proposed work can be a reference for relevant research and contribute to agriculture and biomedicine.