Xia, Jing2008-12-222008-12-222008-12-22http://hdl.handle.net/2097/1113Alternative splicing is a mechanism for generating different gene transcripts (called iso- forms) from the same genomic sequence. Finding alternative splicing events experimentally is both expensive and time consuming. Computational methods in general, and EST analy- sis and machine learning algorithms in particular, can be used to complement experimental methods in the process of identifying alternative splicing events. In this thesis, I first iden- tify alternative splicing exons by analyzing EST-genome alignment. Next, I explore the predictive power of a rich set of features that have been experimentally shown to affect al- ternative splicing. I use these features to build support vector machine (SVM) classifiers for distinguishing between alternatively spliced exons and constitutive exons. My results show that simple, linear SVM classifiers built from a rich set of features give results comparable to those of more sophisticated SVM classifiers that use more basic sequence features. Finally, I use feature selection methods to identify computationally the most informative features for the prediction problem considered.en-US© the author. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/support vector machinealternative splicingThesisComputer Science (0984)