Prediction of piRNA-mRNA interactions based on an interactive inference network

As the largest class of small non-coding RNAs, piRNAs primarily present in the reproductive cells of mammals, which influence post-transcriptional processes of mRNAs in multiple ways. Effective methods for predicting piRNA and mRNA target relationships can help identify piRNA functions, investigate the possibility of piRNAs as biomarkers and therapeutic targets. In this study, we propose a computational approach for classifying the relationships of piRNA-mRNA pairs based on an interactive inference network (IIN). First, we gather piRNA-mRNA target data, collect sequence data by position alignment, and construct a benchmark dataset. Furthermore, a reliable negative set is constructed by positive-unlabeled learning. Finally, we view a piRNA and a mRNA sequence as a premise and hypothesis sentence, respectively, and IIN model is used to predict the relationship between them. The experiments demonstrate that our method effectively characterizes piRNA-mRNA interaction and could be beneficial for researchers to investigate piRNA functions.