MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short RNA molecules which play important roles in the post-trancriptional regulation of gene expression. Their transcription is followed by two RNA III endonuclease processing steps leading to mature miRNA formation. They are then incorporated into the RISC-complex which mediates mRNA targeting. Experimental miRNA prediction is difficult since detection relies on many factors therefore, computational methods have become indispensable. Therefore, machine learning methods rely on features describing precursor-miRNAs (pre-miRNAs) to be able to differentiate them from other hairpins in a genome. It is important to define feature groups which are informative, not highly correlated, and don’t incur a large computational cost in order to facilitate accurate miRNA detection. In this study for more than 800 pre-miRNA features the computational cost and benefit was analyzed. From these analyses five features (assl, lsr(%bp), lscm, asal and hpmfe rf I3), (four structural and one structuralthermodynamic one), which aren’t correlated, informative and are not computationally expensive are noticeable. Analyses are done with human hairpins, pseudo data; and a case study using the measles virus and the measles KEGG pathway genes. Overall calculation of human hairpins and measles virus took approximately 2 USD (United States Dollar) on Amazon web services. Supervised learning and random forest machine learning for miRNA prediction was applied and to two genes (TAB2 and BCC3) within the measles KEGG pathway and three hairpins were predicted. They were found to have human mature miRNA sequences embedded in them and their already annotated targets helped enlarge the KEGG measles pathway.