MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that regulate transcriptional processes via binding to the target gene mRNA. In animals, this binding is imperfect, which makes the computational prediction of animal miRNA targets a challenging task. The accuracy of miRNA target prediction can be improved with the use of machine learning methods. Previous work has described methods using supervised learning, but they suffer from the lack of adequate training examples, a common problem in miRNA target identification, which often leads to deficient generalization ability.