Abstract: N6-methyladenine(6mA) sites plays an important role in regulating gene expression of eukaryotes organisms.Accurate identification of 6mA sites may helpful to understand genome 6mA distributions and biological functions.At present,various experimental methods have been used to identify 6mA sites in different species,but they are too expensive and time-consuming.In this paper,a novel XGBoost-based method,P6mA-Rice,is proposed for identifying 6mA sites in the rice genome.Firstly,DNA sequence coding method based on sequence,which introduces and emphasizes the position specificity information,is first employed to represent the given sequences.Effective feature extraction criteria is proposed from seven aspects to make the expression of DNA information more comprehensive.Then,the selected feature set PS6mA based on the XGBoost feature importance is put into the integrated tree boosting algorithm XGBoost to construct the proposed model P6mA-Rice.The jackknife test on a benchmark dataset demonstrates that P6mA-Rice could obtain 90.55% sensitivity,88.48% specificity,79.00% Mathews correlation coefficient,and a 89.49% accuracy.Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of P6mA-Rice.

Key words: DNA, N6-methyladenine, Position specificity, Sequence, XGBoost