Fig 5. Evaluation of miRAW using different CSSMs and in the presence (AE) and absence (NF) of ΔG_open filtering (threshold = -10Kcal/mol).

Results are evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, sensitivity, negative precision, specificity, positive F1-score and negative F1-score. The best results in terms of accuracy and negative F1-Score were obtained when using Pita’s CSSM and when no filtering was applied. The highest positive F1-Score was obtained by miRAW-7-2:10. Canonical CSSMs (TS and Pita) obtain better results when no filter is applied, the application of ΔG_open filtering introduces false negatives resulting in low sensitivity and negative precision. Conversely, non-canonical CSSMs (miRAW-6-1:10, miRAW-7-1:10 and miRAW-7-2:10) present better results when filtering is applied as this reduces the number of false positives, thereby increasing precision and specificity; when no filtering was applied miRAW was biased towards the prediction of positive sites, which resulted in high sensitivity but low precision.