i4mC-EL: Identifying DNA N4-Methylcytosine Sites in the Mouse Genome Using Ensemble Learning

As one of important epigenetic modifications, DNA N4-methylcytosine (4mC) plays a crucial role in controlling gene replication, expression, cell cycle, DNA replication, and differentiation. The accurate identification of 4mC sites is necessary to understand biological functions. In the paper, we use ensemble learning to develop a model named i4mC-EL to identify 4mC sites in the mouse genome. Firstly, a multifeature encoding scheme consisting of Kmer and EIIP was adopted to describe the DNA sequences. Secondly, on the basis of the multifeature encoding scheme, we developed a stacked ensemble model, in which four machine learning algorithms, namely, BayesNet, NaiveBayes, LibSVM, and Voted Perceptron, were utilized to implement an ensemble of base classifiers that produce intermediate results as input of the metaclassifier, Logistic. The experimental results on the independent test dataset demonstrate that the overall rate of predictive accurate of i4mC-EL is 82.19%, which is better than the existing methods. The user-friendly website implementing i4mC-EL can be accessed freely at the following.