Motif Discovery Using Evolutionary Algorithms

The bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) algorithm is a nature and biologically inspired computing method. We propose an alternative solution integrating bacterial foraging optimization algorithm and tabu search (TS) algorithm namely TS-BFO. We modify the original BFO via established a self-control multi-length chemotactic step mechanism, and introduce rao metric. We utilize it to solve motif discovery problem and compare the experimental result with existing famous DE/EDA algorithm which combines global information extracted by estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) with differential information obtained by Differential evolution (DE) to search promising solutions. The experiments on real data set selected from TRANSFAC and SCPD database have predicted meaningful motif which demonstrated that TS-BFO and DE/EDA are promising approaches for finding motif and enrich the technique of motif discovery.