UFold: Fast and Accurate RNA Secondary Structure Prediction with Deep Learning
AbstractFor many RNA molecules, the secondary structure is essential for the correction function of the RNA. Predicting RNA secondary structure from nucleotide sequences is a long-standing problem in genomics, but the prediction performance has reached a plateau over time. Traditional RNA secondary structure prediction algorithms are primarily based on thermodynamic models through free energy minimization. Here we propose a deep learning-based method, called UFold, for RNA secondary structure prediction, trained directly on annotated data without any thermodynamic assumptions. UFold improves substantially upon previous models, with approximately 31% improvement over traditional thermodynamic models and 24.5% improvement over other learning-based methods. It achieves an F1 score of 0.96 on base pair prediction accuracy. An online web server running UFold is publicly available at http://ufold.ics.uci.edu.