RBP-Former: Joint Prediction of RNA-protein Binding Sites on Full-length RNA Transcripts for Multiple RBPs

RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) are essential for gene expression, and the complex RNA-protein interaction mechanisms require analysis of global RNA information. Therefore, accurate prediction of RBP binding sites on full-length RNA transcripts is crucial for understanding these mechanisms and their roles in diseases. While machine learning methods can predict RBP binding to RNA fragments, extending this to full-length transcripts presents challenges due to sequence length and data imbalance. In this paper, we introduce RBP-Former, a binding site joint prediction model designed specifically for full-length RNA transcripts that can be used for multiple RBPs. This model processes information at both coarse and fine-grained levels to fully exploit sequence data and its interactions with multiple RBPs. We develop multi-level imbalance learning strategies, achieving favorable results on imbalanced data. Our method outperforms existing methods in predicting binding sites on full-length RNA transcripts for multiple RBPs, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling imbalanced label and sample distributions.