The dataset provided in this assignment contains a collection of real DNA sequences. The number of true binding sites is quite limited and that makes the problem challenging. In machine learning community, this is termed as imbalanced datasets. Some techniques dealing with imbalanced data classification, such as sampling or filtering, can be applied for the biological data. It is a good idea to find some relevant publications to see in which way you can build effective classifiers for motif recognition.

The whole dataset should be partitioned into a training dataset used to build the learner models, and a testing dataset used to evaluate generalization capability of the classification systems. System performance will be evaluated by looking at the recall, precision, F-measure and recognition rate for both the training dataset and the test dataset.

It is very important to notice that unlike traditional way for evaluating classifier's performance, here a kmer is classified as a motif instance if its location has at least 50% overlap with a true binding site in the DNA sequences. For example, consider two true binding sites ACACGGGA and ACACGGGA in the following DNA sequence.

ccttacacaaACACGGGAgaattaatACACGGGAtcagatcaataaa (1)

Suppose that the 8mers acaaACAC and ACGGGAtc are classified as binding sites by a learner model. Then, we will count them as correct prediction because they have 50% and 75% overlaps with the true binding sites in sequence (1), respectively. Conversely, if classifiers classify them as non-binding sites, then we will count them as incorrect prediction because they have at least 50% overlaps with the true binding sites. Take another 8mer, GAgaatta, in (1). If it is classified by a learner model as a binding site, then it will be counted as a misclassified one because it has only 25% overlap with the true binding site ACACGGGA