Enhancer-LSTMAtt: A Bi-LSTM and Attention-Based Deep Learning Method for Enhancer Recognition
Guohua Huang, Wei Luo, Guiyang Zhang, Peijie Zheng, Yuhua Yao, Jianyi Lyu, Yuewu Liu, Dong‐Qing Wei
Abstract
Enhancers are short DNA segments that play a key role in biological processes, such as accelerating transcription of target genes. Since the enhancer resides anywhere in a genome sequence, it is difficult to precisely identify enhancers. We presented a bi-directional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) and attention-based deep learning method (Enhancer-LSTMAtt) for enhancer recognition. Enhancer-LSTMAtt is an end-to-end deep learning model that consists mainly of deep residual neural network, Bi-LSTM, and feed-forward attention. We extensively compared the Enhancer-LSTMAtt with 19 state-of-the-art methods by 5-fold cross validation, 10-fold cross validation and independent test. Enhancer-LSTMAtt achieved competitive performances, especially in the independent test. We realized Enhancer-LSTMAtt into a user-friendly web application. Enhancer-LSTMAtt is applicable not only to recognizing enhancers, but also to distinguishing strong enhancer from weak enhancers. Enhancer-LSTMAtt is believed to become a promising tool for identifying enhancers.