RF-DYMHC: Detecting the yeast meiotic recombination hotspots and coldspots by random forest model using gapped dinucleotide composition features

In the yeast, meiotic recombination is initiated by double-strand DNA breaks (DSBs) which occur at relatively high frequencies in some genomic regions (hotspots) and relatively low frequencies in others (coldspots). Although observations concerning individual hot/cold spots have given clues as to the mechanism of recombination initiation, the prediction of hot/cold spots from DNA sequence information is a challenging task. In this article, we introduce a random forest (RF) prediction model to detect recombination hot/cold spots from yeast genome. The out-of-bag (OOB) estimation of the model indicated that the RF classifier achieved high prediction performance with 82.05% total accuracy and 0.638 Mattew's correlation coefficient (MCC) value. Compared with an alternative machinelearning algorithm, support vector machine (SVM), the RF method outperforms it in both sensitivity and specificity. The prediction model is implemented as a web server (RF-DYMHC) and it is freely available at http://www.bioinf.seu.edu.cn/Recombination/rf-dymhc.htm. Given a yeast genome and prediction parameters (RI-value and non-overlapping window scan size), the program reports the predicted hot/cold spots and marks them in color. © 2007 The Author(s).