MiRNA recognition with the yasMiR system: the quest for further improvements.

The paper "Using Base Pairing Probabilities for MiRNA Recognition" by Daniel Pasailă, Irina Mohorianu, and Liviu Ciortuz, that has been published in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC) 2008, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 519-525, has introduced a new SVM for microRNA identification, whose novelty is twofolded: first, many of its features incorporate the base-pairing probabilities provided by McCaskill's algorithm, and second the classification performance is improved using a certain similarity ("profile"-based) measure between the training and test microRNAs and a set of carefully chosen ("pivot") RNA sequences. Comparisons with some of the best existing SVMs for microRNA identification proved that our SVM obtains truly competitive results.