# Description Generation using Variational Auto-Encoders for precursor microRNA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17970 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17970/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [MADE: Masked Autoencoder for Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03509/) (2015)
- [DIVA: Domain Invariant Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10427/) (2019)
- [Generating and designing DNA with deep generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06148/) (2017)
- [Deep Generative Modeling for Protein Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13754/) (2021)
- [StampNet: unsupervised multi-class object discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02693/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Micro RNAs (miRNA) are a type of non-coding RNA, which are involved in gene regulation and can be associated with diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular and neurological diseases. As such, identifying the entire genome of miRNA can be of great relevance. Since experimental methods for novel precursor miRNA (pre-miRNA) detection are complex and expensive, computational detection using ML could be useful. Existing ML methods are often complex black boxes, which do not create an interpretable structural description of pre-miRNA. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, which makes use of generative modeling through Variational Auto-Encoders to uncover the generative factors of pre-miRNA. After training the VAE, the pre-miRNA description is developed using a decision tree on the lower dimensional latent space. Applying the framework to miRNA classification, we obtain a high reconstruction and classification performance, while also developing an accurate miRNA description.