Developing an efficient method for determination of the DNA-binding proteins, due to their vital roles in gene regulation, is becoming highly desired since it would be invaluable to advance our understanding of protein functions. In this study, we proposed a new method for the prediction of the DNA-binding proteins, by performing the feature rank using random forest and the wrapper-based feature selection using forward best-first search strategy. The features comprise information from primary sequence, predicted secondary structure, predicted relative solvent accessibility, and position specific scoring matrix. The proposed method, called DBPPred, used Gaussian naïve Bayes as the underlying classifier since it outperformed five other classifiers, including decision tree, logistic regression, k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine with polynomial kernel, and support vector machine with radial basis function. As a result, the proposed DBPPred yields the highest average accuracy of 0.791 and average MCC of 0.583 according to the five-fold cross validation with ten runs on the training benchmark dataset PDB594. Subsequently, blind tests on the independent dataset PDB186 by the proposed model trained on the entire PDB594 dataset and by other five existing methods (including iDNA-Prot, DNA-Prot, DNAbinder, DNABIND and DBD-Threader) were performed, resulting in that the proposed DBPPred yielded the highest accuracy of 0.769, MCC of 0.538, and AUC of 0.790. The independent tests performed by the proposed DBPPred on completely a large non-DNA binding protein dataset and two RNA binding protein datasets also showed improved or comparable quality when compared with the relevant prediction methods. Moreover, we observed that majority of the selected features by the proposed method are statistically significantly different between the mean feature values of the DNA-binding and the non DNA-binding proteins. All of the experimental results indicate that the proposed DBPPred can be an alternative perspective predictor for large-scale determination of DNA-binding proteins.

Repeated measures are increasingly collected in a study to investigate the trajectory of measures over time. One of the first research questions is to determine the correlation between two measures. The following five methods for correlation calculation are compared: (1) Pearson correlation; (2) correlation of subject means; (3) partial correlation for subject effect; (4) partial correlation for visit effect; and (5) a mixed model approach. Pearson correlation coefficient is traditionally used in a cross-sectional study. Pearson correlation is close to the correlations computed from mixed-effects models that consider the correlation structure, but Pearson correlation may not be theoretically appropriate in a repeated-measure study as it ignores the correlation of the outcomes from multiple visits within the same subject. We compare these methods with regard to the average of correlation and the mean squared error. In general, correlation under the mixed-effects model with the compound symmetric structure is recommended as its correlation is close to the nominal level with small mean square error.

It may be very difficult to receive the signals from satellite positioning systems due to the existing obstacles in indoor environment. Arising from the popularity of smart phones, Wi-Fi based indoor positioning technology has the advantages with convenient deployment and low hardware cost. In this study, we focused on indoor positioning using Wi-Fi fingerprint data that were collected in shopping malls. Due to the volatility of Wi-Fi signals and the high-dimensional sparseness of fingerprint data, we proposed a feature extraction algorithm, called joint multi-task stacked denoising auto-encoder (JMT-SDAE), aiming at reducing the dimensionality of the original fingerprint data and improving the indoor positioning performance in shopping malls. Furthermore, the features extracted by JMT-SDAE and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) were merged to construct a hybrid model, named as JMT-SDAE+GBDT. The experimental results based on 13 location datasets showed that the proposed feature fusion model had better positioning accuracy when compared with other existing positioners, and thus confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed feature extraction algorithm through multi-task learning.