2,654 research outputs found
Wearable Sensor Data Based Human Activity Recognition using Machine Learning: A new approach
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of human activity
recognition (HAR) based on wearable sensor data. One can find many practical
applications in this area, especially in the field of health care. Many machine
learning algorithms such as Decision Trees, Support Vector Machine, Naive
Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor, and Multilayer Perceptron are successfully used in
HAR. Although these methods are fast and easy for implementation, they still
have some limitations due to poor performance in a number of situations. In
this paper, we propose a novel method based on the ensemble learning to boost
the performance of these machine learning methods for HAR
PRETICTIVE BIOINFORMATIC METHODS FOR ANALYZING GENES AND PROTEINS
Since large amounts of biological data are generated using various high-throughput technologies, efficient computational methods are important for understanding the biological meanings behind the complex data. Machine learning is particularly appealing for biological knowledge discovery. Tissue-specific gene expression and protein sumoylation play essential roles in the cell and are implicated in many human diseases. Protein destabilization is a common mechanism by which mutations cause human diseases. In this study, machine learning approaches were developed for predicting human tissue-specific genes, protein sumoylation sites and protein stability changes upon single amino acid substitutions. Relevant biological features were selected for input vector encoding, and machine learning algorithms, including Random Forests and Support Vector Machines, were used for classifier construction. The results suggest that the approaches give rise to more accurate predictions than previous studies and can provide valuable information for further experimental studies. Moreover, seeSUMO and MuStab web servers were developed to make the classifiers accessible to the biological research community. Structure-based methods can be used to predict the effects of amino acid substitutions on protein function and stability. The nonsynonymous Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (nsSNPs) located at the protein binding interface have dramatic effects on protein-protein interactions. To model the effects, the nsSNPs at the interfaces of 264 protein-protein complexes were mapped on the protein structures using homology-based methods. The results suggest that disease-causing nsSNPs tend to destabilize the electrostatic component of the binding energy and nsSNPs at conserved positions have significant effects on binding energy changes. The structure-based approach was developed to quantitatively assess the effects of amino acid substitutions on protein stability and protein-protein interaction. It was shown that the structure-based analysis could help elucidate the mechanisms by which mutations cause human genetic disorders. These new bioinformatic methods can be used to analyze some interesting genes and proteins for human genetic research and improve our understanding of their molecular mechanisms underlying human diseases
Predicting siRNA potency with random forests and support vector machines
Abstract Background Short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) can be used to knockdown gene expression in functional genomics. For a target gene of interest, many siRNA molecules may be designed, whereas their efficiency of expression inhibition often varies. Results To facilitate gene functional studies, we have developed a new machine learning method to predict siRNA potency based on random forests and support vector machines. Since there were many potential sequence features, random forests were used to select the most relevant features affecting gene expression inhibition. Support vector machine classifiers were then constructed using the selected sequence features for predicting siRNA potency. Interestingly, gene expression inhibition is significantly affected by nucleotide dimer and trimer compositions of siRNA sequence. Conclusions The findings in this study should help design potent siRNAs for functional genomics, and might also provide further insights into the molecular mechanism of RNA interference
Sequence-Based Classification Using Discriminatory Motif Feature Selection
Most existing methods for sequence-based classification use exhaustive feature generation, employing, for example, all -mer patterns. The motivation behind such (enumerative) approaches is to minimize the potential for overlooking important features. However, there are shortcomings to this strategy. First, practical constraints limit the scope of exhaustive feature generation to patterns of length , such that potentially important, longer () predictors are not considered. Second, features so generated exhibit strong dependencies, which can complicate understanding of derived classification rules. Third, and most importantly, numerous irrelevant features are created. These concerns can compromise prediction and interpretation. While remedies have been proposed, they tend to be problem-specific and not broadly applicable. Here, we develop a generally applicable methodology, and an attendant software pipeline, that is predicated on discriminatory motif finding. In addition to the traditional training and validation partitions, our framework entails a third level of data partitioning, a discovery partition. A discriminatory motif finder is used on sequences and associated class labels in the discovery partition to yield a (small) set of features. These features are then used as inputs to a classifier in the training partition. Finally, performance assessment occurs on the validation partition. Important attributes of our approach are its modularity (any discriminatory motif finder and any classifier can be deployed) and its universality (all data, including sequences that are unaligned and/or of unequal length, can be accommodated). We illustrate our approach on two nucleosome occupancy datasets and a protein solubility dataset, previously analyzed using enumerative feature generation. Our method achieves excellent performance results, with and without optimization of classifier tuning parameters. A Python pipeline implementing the approach is available at http://www.epibiostat.ucsf.edu/biostat/sen/dmfs/
Statistical methods for tissue array images - algorithmic scoring and co-training
Recent advances in tissue microarray technology have allowed
immunohistochemistry to become a powerful medium-to-high throughput analysis
tool, particularly for the validation of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers.
However, as study size grows, the manual evaluation of these assays becomes a
prohibitive limitation; it vastly reduces throughput and greatly increases
variability and expense. We propose an algorithm - Tissue Array Co-Occurrence
Matrix Analysis (TACOMA) - for quantifying cellular phenotypes based on
textural regularity summarized by local inter-pixel relationships. The
algorithm can be easily trained for any staining pattern, is absent of
sensitive tuning parameters and has the ability to report salient pixels in an
image that contribute to its score. Pathologists' input via informative
training patches is an important aspect of the algorithm that allows the
training for any specific marker or cell type. With co-training, the error rate
of TACOMA can be reduced substantially for a very small training sample (e.g.,
with size 30). We give theoretical insights into the success of co-training via
thinning of the feature set in a high-dimensional setting when there is
"sufficient" redundancy among the features. TACOMA is flexible, transparent and
provides a scoring process that can be evaluated with clarity and confidence.
In a study based on an estrogen receptor (ER) marker, we show that TACOMA is
comparable to, or outperforms, pathologists' performance in terms of accuracy
and repeatability.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS543 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
A NEW METHODOLOGY FOR IDENTIFYING INTERFACE RESIDUES INVOLVED IN BINDING PROTEIN COMPLEXES
Genome-sequencing projects with advanced technologies have rapidly increased the amount of protein sequences, and demands for identifying protein interaction sites are significantly increased due to its impact on understanding cellular process, biochemical events and drug design studies. However, the capacity of current wet laboratory techniques is not enough to handle the exponentially growing protein sequence data; therefore, sequence based predictive methods identifying protein interaction sites have drawn increasing interest. In this article, a new predictive model which can be valuable as a first approach for guiding experimental methods investigating protein-protein interactions and localizing the specific interface residues is proposed. The proposed method extracts a wide range of features from protein sequences. Random forests framework is newly redesigned to effectively utilize these features and the problems of imbalanced data classification commonly encountered in binding site predictions. The method is evaluated with 2,829 interface residues and 24,616 non-interface residues extracted from 99 polypeptide chains in the Protein Data Bank. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs significantly better than two other conventional predictive methods and can reliably predict residues involved in protein interaction sites. As blind tests, the proposed method predicts interaction sites and constructs three protein complexes: the DnaK molecular chaperone system, 1YUW and 1DKG, which provide new insight into the sequence-function relationship. Finally, the robustness of the proposed method is assessed by evaluating the performances obtained from four different ensemble methods
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