A novel approach for accurate identification of splice junctions based on hybrid algorithms

Abstract

The precise prediction of splice junctions as 'exon-intron' or 'intron-exon' boundaries in a given DNA sequence is an important task in Bioinformatics. The main challenge is to determine the splice sites in the coding region. Due to the intrinsic complexity and the uncertainty in gene sequence, the adoption of data mining methods is increasingly becoming popular. There are various methods developed on different strategies in this direction. This article focuses on the construction of new hybrid machine learning ensembles that solve the splice junction task more effectively. A novel supervised feature reduction technique is developed using entropy-based fuzzy rough set theory optimized by greedy hill-climbing algorithm. The average prediction accuracy achieved is above 98% with 95% confidence interval. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated using various metrics to establish the statistical significance of the results. The experiments are conducted using various schemes with human DNA sequence data. The obtained results are highly promising as compared with the state-of-the-art approaches in literature.