A novel ant colony optimization based algorithm for identifying gene regulatory elements

It is one of the most important tasks in bioinformatics to identify the regulatory elements in gene sequences. Most of the current algorithms for identifying regulatory elements are easily to converge into a local optimum, and have high time complexity. Therefore, we propose a novel optimization algorithm named ACRI(antcolony- regulatory-identification) for identifying regulatory elements. Based on powerful optimization ability of antcolony algorithm, the algorithm ACRI can not only improve the quality of results, but also solve the problem at a very high speed. Experimental results show that ACRI can obtain higher quality of solutions using less computational time than other traditional algorithms.