ADH-Enhancer: an attention-based deep hybrid framework for enhancer identification and strength prediction

Enhancers play an important role in the process of gene expression regulation. In DNA sequence abundance or absence of enhancers and irregularities in the strength of enhancers affects gene expression process that leads to the initiation and propagation of diverse types of genetic diseases such as hemophilia, bladder cancer, diabetes and congenital disorders. Enhancer identification and strength prediction through experimental approaches is expensive, time-consuming and error-prone. To accelerate and expedite the research related to enhancers identification and strength prediction, around 19 computational frameworks have been proposed. These frameworks used machine and deep learning methods that take raw DNA sequences and predict enhancer's presence and strength. However, these frameworks still lack in performance and are not useful in real time analysis. This paper presents a novel deep learning framework that uses language modeling strategies for transforming DNA sequences into statistical feature space. It applies transfer learning by training a language model in an unsupervised fashion by predicting a group of nucleotides also known as k-mers based on the context of existing k-mers in a sequence. At the classification stage, it presents a novel classifier that reaps the benefits of two different architectures: convolutional neural network and attention mechanism. The proposed framework is evaluated over the enhancer identification benchmark dataset where it outperforms the existing best-performing framework by 5%, and 9% in terms of accuracy and MCC. Similarly, when evaluated over the enhancer strength prediction benchmark dataset, it outperforms the existing best-performing framework by 4%, and 7% in terms of accuracy and MCC.