Prediction of DNase I hypersensitive sites by using pseudo nucleotide compositions

DNase I hypersensitive sites (DHS) associated with a wide variety of regulatory DNA elements. Knowledge about the locations of DHS is helpful for deciphering the function of noncoding genomic regions. With the acceleration of genome sequences in the postgenomic age, it is highly desired to develop cost-effective computational methods to identify DHS. In the present work, a support vector machine based model was proposed to identify DHS by using the pseudo dinucleotide composition. In the jackknife test, the proposed model obtained an accuracy of 83%, which is competitive with that of the existing method. This result suggests that the proposed model may become a useful tool for DHS identifications.