Estimation of weighted log partial area under the ROC curve and its application to MicroRNA expression data

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs that play critical roles in numerous cellular processes through post-transcriptional functions. The aberrant role of miRNAs has been reported in a number of diseases. A robust computational method is vital to discover novel miRNAs where level of noise varies dramatically across the different miRNAs. In this paper, we propose a flexible rank-based procedure for estimating a weighted log partial area …