DIRECTION: a machine learning framework for predicting and characterizing DNA methylation and hydroxymethylation in mammalian genomes

5-Methylcytosine and 5-Hydroxymethylcytosine in DNA are major epigenetic modifications known to significantly alter mammalian gene expression. High-throughput assays to detect these modifications are expensive, labor-intensive, unfeasible in some contexts and leave a portion of the genome unqueried. Hence, we devised a novel, supervised, integrative learning framework to perform whole-genome methylation and hydroxymethylation predictions in CpG dinucleotides. Our framework can also perform imputation of missing or low quality data in existing sequencing datasets. Additionally, we developed infrastructure to perform in silico, high-throughput hypotheses testing on such predicted methylation or hydroxymethylation maps.