Stanford RNA 3D Folding

Kaggle competition entry for predicting RNA 3D structure from sequence — a pipeline + evaluation stack using TM-align for structural scoring.

Sun Jun 01 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Entry for the Stanford RNA 3D Folding Kaggle competition — predicting 3D atomic coordinates for RNA molecules from primary sequence, evaluated by structural similarity against experimentally determined targets.

What’s in the repo

Five iterative pipelines (pipeline1 → pipeline5) progressing from baseline featurization to more sophisticated architectures, plus:

  • TM-align integration (TMalign.cpp compiled locally) for structural scoring against ground-truth coordinates — the closer the predicted tertiary structure, the higher the score.
  • Evaluation harness (evaluation.ipynb) running per-molecule structural comparisons and summarizing by length bin, family, and difficulty.

Approach

RNA folding sits at an awkward intersection: much less data than protein folding (no RNA-level equivalent of AlphaFold’s training set), but the same underlying physics. The pipelines explore featurization choices — base-pairing priors, sequence embeddings, pairwise distance maps — and evaluate which features carry the most signal once you score by TM-align rather than per-residue error.

Primary artifacts (trained checkpoints, 290GB of competition sequence data) kept locally; repo carries the pipeline code and evaluation stack.

Code: github.com/rohit-ravi2/rnafold-v2