A deep learning approach to DNA sequence classification

Deep learning neural networks are capable to extract significant features from raw data, and to use these features for classification tasks. In this work we present a deep learning neural network for DNA sequence classification based on spectral sequence representation. The framework is tested on a dataset of 16S genes and its performances, in terms of accuracy and F1 score, are compared to the General Regression Neural Network, already tested on a similar problem, as well as naive Bayes, random forest and support vector machine classifiers. The obtained results demonstrate that the deep learning approach outperformed all the other classifiers when considering classification of small sequence fragment 500 bp long.