Prediction of translation initiation sites using classifier selection

Abstract

The prediction of the translation initiation site (TIS) in a genomic sequence is an important issue in biological research. Several methods have been proposed to deal with it. However, it is still an open problem. In this paper we follow an approach consisting of a number of steps in order to increase TIS prediction accuracy. First, all the sequences are scanned and the candidate TISs are detected. These sites are grouped according to the length of the sequence upstream and downstream them and a number of features is generated for each one. The features are evaluated among the instances of every group and a number of the top ranked ones are selected for building a classifier. A new instance is assigned to a group and is classified by the corresponding classifier. We experiment with various feature sets and classification algorithms, compare with alternative methods and draw important conclusions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.