Genomic Island Prediction via Chi-Square Test and Random Forest Algorithm

Genomic islands are related to microbial adaptation and carry different genomic characteristics from the host. Therefore, many methods have been proposed to detect genomic islands from the rest of the genome by evaluating its sequence composition. Many sequence features have been proposed, but many of them have not been applied to the identification of genomic islands. In this paper, we present a scheme to predict genomic islands using the chi-square test and random forest algorithm. We extract seven kinds of sequence features and select the important features with the chi-square test. All the selected features are then input into the random forest to predict the genome islands. Three experiments and comparison show that the proposed method achieves the best performance. This understanding can be useful to design more powerful method for the genomic island prediction.