Dataset Information

MS4--Multi-Scale Selector of Sequence Signatures: an alignment-free method for classification of biological sequences.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: While multiple alignment is the first step of usual classification schemes for biological sequences, alignment-free methods are being increasingly used as alternatives when multiple alignments fail. Subword-based combinatorial methods are popular for their low algorithmic complexity (suffix trees ...) or exhaustivity (motif search), in general with fixed length word and/or number of mismatches. We developed previously a method to detect local similarities (the N-local decoding) based on the occurrences of repeated subwords of fixed length, which does not impose a fixed number of mismatches. The resulting similarities are, for some "good" values of N, sufficiently relevant to form the basis of a reliable alignment-free classification. The aim of this paper is to develop a method that uses the similarities detected by N-local decoding while not imposing a fixed value of N. We present a procedure that selects for every position in the sequences an adaptive value of N, and we implement it as the MS4 classification tool. RESULTS: Among the equivalence classes produced by the N-local decodings for all N, we select a (relatively) small number of "relevant" classes corresponding to variable length subwords that carry enough information to perform the classification. The parameter N, for which correct values are data-dependent and thus hard to guess, is here replaced by the average repetitivity kappa of the sequences. We show that our approach yields classifications of several sets of HIV/SIV sequences that agree with the accepted taxonomy, even on usually discarded repetitive regions (like the non-coding part of LTR). CONCLUSIONS: The method MS4 satisfactorily classifies a set of sequences that are notoriously hard to align. This suggests that our approach forms the basis of a reliable alignment-free classification tool. The only parameter kappa of MS4 seems to give reasonable results even for its default value, which can be a great advantage for sequence sets for which little information is available.

SUBMITTER: Corel E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2923138 | biostudies-literature | 2010

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

MS4--Multi-Scale Selector of Sequence Signatures: an alignment-free method for classification of biological sequences.

Corel Eduardo E Pitschi Florian F Laprevotte Ivan I Grasseau Gilles G Didier Gilles G Devauchelle Claudine C

BMC bioinformatics 20100730

<h4>Background</h4>While multiple alignment is the first step of usual classification schemes for biological sequences, alignment-free methods are being increasingly used as alternatives when multiple alignments fail. Subword-based combinatorial methods are popular for their low algorithmic complexity (suffix trees ...) or exhaustivity (motif search), in general with fixed length word and/or number of mismatches. We developed previously a method to detect local similarities (the N-local decoding ...[more]

PMID: 20673356

Similar Datasets

Project description:BACKGROUND: Comparison and classification of metagenome samples is one of the major tasks in the study of microbial communities of natural environments or niches on human bodies. Bioinformatics methods play important roles on this task, including 16S rRNA gene analysis and some alignment-based or alignment-free methods on metagenomic data. Alignment-free methods have the advantage of not depending on known genome annotations and therefore have high potential in studying complicated microbiomes. However, the existing alignment-free methods are all based on unsupervised learning strategy (e.g., PCA or hierarchical clustering). These types of methods are powerful in revealing major similarities and grouping relations between microbiome samples, but cannot be applied for discriminating predefined classes of interest which might not be the dominating assortment in the data. Supervised classification is needed in the latter scenario, with the goal of classifying samples into predefined classes and finding the features that can discriminate the classes. The effectiveness of supervised classification with alignment-based features on metagenomic data have been shown in some recent studies. The application of alignment-free supervised classification methods on metagenome data has not been well explored yet. RESULTS: We developed a method for this task using k-tuple frequencies as features counted directly from metagenome short reads and the R-SVM (Recursive SVM) for feature selection and classification. We tested our method on a simulation dataset, a real dataset composed of several known genomes, and a real metagenome NGS short reads dataset. Experiments on simulated data showed that the method can classify the classes almost perfectly and can recover major sequence signatures that distinguish the two classes. On the real human gut metagenome data, the method can discriminate samples of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients from control samples with high accuracy, which cannot be separated when comparing the samples with unsupervised clustering approaches. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed alignment-free supervised classification method can perform well in discriminating of metagenomic samples of predefined classes and in selecting characteristic sequence features for the discrimination. This study shows as an example on the feasibility of using metagenome sequence features of microbiomes on human bodies to study specific human health conditions using supervised machine learning methods.

Dataset Information

MS4--Multi-Scale Selector of Sequence Signatures: an alignment-free method for classification of biological sequences.

Publications

MS4--Multi-Scale Selector of Sequence Signatures: an alignment-free method for classification of biological sequences.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets