SFM: A novel sequence-based fusion method for disease genes identification and prioritization

The identification of disease genes from human genome is of great importance to improve diagnosis and treatment of disease. Several machine learning methods have been introduced to identify disease genes. However, these methods mostly differ in the prior knowledge used to construct the feature vector for each instance (gene), the ways of selecting negative data (non-disease genes) where there is no investigational approach to find them and the classification methods used to make the final decision. In this work, a novel Sequence-based fusion method (SFM) is proposed to identify disease genes. In this regard, unlike existing methods, instead of using a noisy and incomplete prior-knowledge, the amino acid sequence of the proteins which is universal data has been carried out to present the genes (proteins) into four different feature vectors. To select more likely negative data from candidate genes, the intersection set of four negative sets which are generated using distance approach is considered. Then, Decision Tree (C4.5) has been applied as a fusion method to combine the results of four independent state-of the-art predictors based on support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, and to make the final decision. The experimental results of the proposed method have been evaluated by some standard measures. The results indicate the precision, recall and F-measure of 82.6%, 85.6% and 84, respectively. These results confirm the efficiency and validity of the proposed method. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.