Comparison of Statistical Algorithms for Predicting Splice Junctions in mRNA Precursors of Mammalian Genes

It is well known that many eukaryotic genes are interruped by introns, which are removed from mRNA precursors by the RNA splicing mechanism. While it is well accepted that the consensus sequences of exon-intron boundaries in mRNA precursors are important for specifying splice sites, the signals that govern the excision of introns are not well understood yet, because actual splice site sequences are more or less dierent from the consensus sequences. So far several statsistical methods for predicting actual splice site sequences ( splice junc-tions)in pre-mRNAs of mammalian genes have been proposed. Shapiro-Senapathy gave a method by weight matrix; Iida has proposed a method based on the quantication analy-sis(categorical discriminant analysis). He applied his method for analyzing the 3'-splice site sequences as well as 5'-splice site and discussed mutational problems in beta-globin genes. However, while the statistical methods proposed so far have some ability for predicting the splice site sequences in statistical tests, it seems to be far from sucient whenn applied to actual problems i.e., predicting the actual splice junctions in complete mammalian genes. We propose here a new algorithm which can be applicable to predict actual splice junc-tions in complete mammalian genes and demonstrate its ability by comparing the predictin