A Recurrent Neural Network approach for whole genome bacteria identification

The identification of bacteria plays an essential role in multiple areas of research. Those areas include experimental biology, food and water industries, pathology, microbiology, and evolutionary studies. Although there exist methodologies for identification, a transition to a whole-genome sequence-based taxonomy is already undergoing. Next-Generation Sequencing helps the transition by producing DNA sequence data efficiently. However, the rate of DNA sequence data generation and the high dimensionality of such data need faster computer methodologies. Machine learning, an area of artificial intelligence, has the ability to analyze high dimensional data in a systematic, fast, and efficient way. Therefore, we propose a sequential deep learning model for bacteria identification. The proposed neural network exploits the vast amounts of information generated by Next-Generation Sequencing, in order to extract an identification model for whole-genome bacteria sequences. After validating the identification model, the bidirectional recurrent neural network outperformed other classification approaches.