iCRBP-LKHA: Large convolutional kernel and hybrid channel-spatial attention for identifying circRNA-RBP interaction sites

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) play vital roles in transcription and translation. Identification of circRNA-RBP (RNA-binding protein) interaction sites has become a fundamental step in molecular and cell biology. Deep learning (DL)-based methods have been proposed to predict circRNA-RBP interaction sites and achieved impressive identification performance. However, those methods cannot effectively capture long-distance dependencies, and cannot effectively utilize the interaction information of multiple features. To overcome those limitations, we propose a DL-based model iCRBP-LKHA using deep hybrid networks for identifying circRNA-RBP interaction sites. iCRBP-LKHA adopts five encoding schemes. Meanwhile, the neural network architecture, which consists of large kernel convolutional neural network (LKCNN), convolutional block attention module with one-dimensional convolution (CBAM-1D) and bidirectional gating recurrent unit (BiGRU), can explore local information, global context information and multiple features interaction information automatically. To verify the effectiveness of iCRBP-LKHA, we compared its performance with shallow learning algorithms on 37 circRNAs datasets and 37 circRNAs stringent datasets. And we compared its performance with state-of-the-art DL-based methods on 37 circRNAs datasets, 37 circRNAs stringent datasets and 31 linear RNAs datasets. The experimental results not only show that iCRBP-LKHA outperforms other competing methods, but also demonstrate the potential of this model in identifying other RNA-RBP interaction sites.Author summary: The interaction between circRNAs and RBPs is one of the main activities of circRNAs. CircRNAs participate in the occurrence and development of diseases by interacting with RBPs. Identifying circRNA-RBP interaction sites have become a fundamental step for exploring the role of circRNA in the occurrence and progression of diseases. Many computational methods have been proposed to predict circRNA-RBP interaction sites. Nevertheless, they still have several limitations. For long nucleotide sequence data of circRNA, traditional CNN or LSTM cannot effectively capture long-distance dependencies (relationships between non-adjacent nucleotides in a circRNA). Furthermore, existing methods fail to effectively utilize the interaction information of multiple features, and insufficient consideration of interaction information leads to biased circRNA-RBP interaction relationships. To overcome these limitations, we propose iCRBP-LKHA, based on a large convolutional kernel and hybrid channel-spatial attention for identifying circRNA-RBP interaction sites. We compared its performance with state-of-the-art DL-based methods on 37 circRNAs datasets, 37 circRNAs stringent datasets and 31 linear RNAs datasets. Experimental results not only show that iCRBP-LKHA outperforms competing methods, but also demonstrate the potential of this model in identifying other RNA-RBP interaction sites.