A comparative study of machine-learning methods to predict the effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms on protein function

The large volume of single nucleotide polymorphism data now available motivates the development of methods for distinguishing neutral changes from those which have real biological effects. Here, two different machine-learning methods, decision trees and support vector machines (SVMs), are applied for the first time to this problem. In common with most other methods, only non-synonymous changes in protein coding regions of the genome are considered.