Improving the Accuracy of Classifiers for the Prediction of Translation Initiation Sites in Genomic Sequences

The prediction of the Translation Initiation Site (TIS) in a genomic sequence is an important issue in biological research. Although several methods have been proposed to deal with this problem, there is a great potential for the improvement of the accuracy of these methods. Due to various reasons, including noise in the data as well as biological reasons, TIS prediction is still an open problem and definitely not a trivial task. In this paper we follow a three-step approach in order to increase TIS prediction accuracy. In the first step, we use a feature generation algorithm we developed. In the second step, all the candidate features, including some new ones generated by our algorithm, are ranked according to their impact to the accuracy of the prediction. Finally, in the third step, a classification model is built using a number of the top ranked features. We experiment with various feature sets, feature selection methods and classification algorithms, compare with alternative methods, draw important conclusions and propose improved models with respect to prediction accuracy.