Engineering Support Vector Machine Kernels That Recognize Translation Initiation Sites (Extended Abstract)

In order to extract protein sequences from nucleotide sequences, it is an important step to recognize points from which regions encoding proteins start, the so-called translation initiation sites (TIS). This can be modeled as a classification problem. We demonstrate the power of support vector machines (SVMs) for this task, and show how to successfully incorporate biological prior knowledge by engineering an appropriate kernel function