Hierarchical and Non-Hierarchical Classification of Transposable Elements with a Genetic Algorithm

Authors

  • Gean T. Pereira Federal University of São Carlos
  • Ricardo Cerri Federal University of São Carlos

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5753/jidm.2018.2051

Keywords:

Genetic Algorithms, Hierarchical Classification, Machine Learning, Rule Induction, Transposable Elements

Abstract

In traditional classification an instance is assigned to one class within a small set of classes. However, there are problems where an instance is related to many classes hierarchically structured, known as Hierarchical Classification
(HC), which is present in many domains like Text Categorization, Music Genre Classification and Bioinformatics. A topic that has gained attention recently is the classification of Transposable Elements (TEs), which are DNA sequences capable of moving inside the genome. TEs have a great importance in the genetic variability of species, since they can modify the functionality of host genes. Despite the research relevance, just a few tools perform its automatic classification and most of them do not use more elaborated strategies, like using Machine Learning to learn models from data. Moreover, the interpretability of these methods is still an issue. In this work, we extend the original study that proposed the global method HC-GA, presenting some improvements such as new fitness functions which were compared and analyzed per level and in the leaf nodes, as well as with respect to the interpretability of the rules generated. Besides, we compare the new best results of HC-GA with the results of flat methods previously reported in the original paper for the task of predicting the TEs leaf node classes. As experiments showed, flat methods do not performed well for HC datasets, even ignoring the hierarchical relationships among classes. We believe this occurred due the high imbalance of these datasets, which is something that flat methods do not handle well, unlike HC ones. HC-GA overcame flat classifiers, presenting promising results for multiple class levels including leaf node classes, even though it was not originally designed for this purpose, and considering the difficulty of predicting lower classes in a hierarchy.

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Published

2018-10-01

How to Cite

T. Pereira, G., & Cerri, R. (2018). Hierarchical and Non-Hierarchical Classification of Transposable Elements with a Genetic Algorithm. Journal of Information and Data Management, 9(2), 163. https://doi.org/10.5753/jidm.2018.2051

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Section

KDMILE 2017