Comparative analysis and prediction of nucleosome positioning using integrative feature representation and machine learning algorithms

Background Nucleosome plays an important role in the process of genome expression, DNA replication, DNA repair and transcription. Therefore, the research of nucleosome positioning has invariably received extensive attention. Considering the diversity of DNA sequence representation methods, we tried to integrate multiple features to analyze its effect in the process of nucleosome positioning analysis. This process can also deepen our understanding of the theoretical analysis of nucleosome positioning. Results Here, we not only used frequency chaos game representation (FCGR) to construct DNA sequence features, but also integrated it with other features and adopted the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm. Simultaneously, support vector machine (SVM), extreme learning machine (ELM), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), multilayer perceptron (MLP) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) are used as predictors for nucleosome positioning prediction analysis, respectively. The integrated feature vector prediction quality is significantly superior to a single feature. After using principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the feature dimension, the prediction quality of H. sapiens dataset has been significantly improved. Conclusions Comparative analysis and prediction on H. sapiens, C. elegans, D. melanogaster and S. cerevisiae datasets, demonstrate that the application of FCGR to nucleosome positioning is feasible, and we also found that integrative feature representation would be better.