Frontiers in Microbiology (Dec 2022)

A capsule network-based method for identifying transcription factors

  • Peijie Zheng,
  • Yue Qi,
  • Xueyong Li,
  • Yuewu Liu,
  • Yuhua Yao,
  • Guohua Huang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2022.1048478
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13

Abstract

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Transcription factors (TFs) are typical regulators for gene expression and play versatile roles in cellular processes. Since it is time-consuming, costly, and labor-intensive to detect it by using physical methods, it is desired to develop a computational method to detect TFs. Here, we presented a capsule network-based method for identifying TFs. This method is an end-to-end deep learning method, consisting mainly of an embedding layer, bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) layer, capsule network layer, and three fully connected layers. The presented method obtained an accuracy of 0.8820, being superior to the state-of-the-art methods. These empirical experiments showed that the inclusion of the capsule network promoted great performances and that the capsule network-based representation was superior to the property-based representation for distinguishing between TFs and non-TFs. We also implemented the presented method into a user-friendly web server, which is freely available at http://www.biolscience.cn/Capsule_TF/ for all scientific researchers.

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