MVSLLnc: LncRNA subcellular localization prediction based on multi-source features and two-stage voting strategy

The subcellular localization of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) is crucial for understanding the function of lncRNAs. Since the traditional biological experimental methods are time-consuming and some existing computational methods rely on high computing power, we are committed to finding a simple and easy-to-implement method to achieve more efficient prediction of the subcellular localization of lncRNAs. In this work, we proposed a model based on multi-source features and two-stage voting strategy for predicting the subcellular localization of lncRNAs (MVSLLnc). The multi-source features include k-mer frequency, features based on the coordinate values of Chaos Game Representation (CGR) and features based on physicochemical property (PhyChe). We feed the multi-source features into the traditional machine learning classifiers RF, SVM and XGBoost, respectively, and perform the final prediction task with two-stage voting strategy. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that the accuracy can reach 0.829, 0.793 and 0.968, respectively. The accuracy on three independent test sets is 0.642, 0.737 and 0.518, respectively, which are competitive with the existing methods. Our ablation analyses show that the two-stage voting strategy can make full use of the advantages of multi-source features and multiple classifiers, and obtain more robust results.