DeepCAC: a deep learning approach on DNA transcription factors classification based on multi-head self-attention and concatenate convolutional neural network
Open accessAbstract
Understanding gene expression processes necessitates the accurate classification and identification of transcription factors, which is supported by high-throughput sequencing technologies. However, these techniques suffer from inherent limitations such as time consumption and high costs. To address these challenges, the field of bioinformatics has increasingly turned to deep learning technologies for analyzing gene sequences. Nevertheless, the pursuit of improved experimental results has led to the inclusion of numerous complex analysis function modules, resulting in models with a growing number of parameters. To overcome these limitations, it is proposed a novel approach for analyzing DNA transcription factor sequences, which is named as DeepCAC. This method leverages deep convolutional neural networks with a multi-head self-attention mechanism. By employing convolutional neural networks, it can effectively capture local hidden features in the sequences. Simultaneously, the multi-head self-attention mechanism enhances the identification of hidden features with long-distant dependencies. This approach reduces the overall number of parameters in the model while harnessing the computational power of sequence data from multi-head self-attention. Through training with labeled data, experiments demonstrate that this approach significantly improves performance while requiring fewer parameters compared to existing methods. Additionally, the effectiveness of our approach is validated in accurately predicting DNA transcription factor sequences.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
CNN has been widely applied in various medical imaging, laboratory reports, pathology reports, etc., and has achieved remarkable success in the field of AI-based diagnosis.
“Recently, the CNN has been widely applied in various medical imaging, laboratory reports, pathology reports, etc., and has achieved remarkable success in the field of AI-based diagnosis [51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58].”
From A Comprehensive Review on Synergy of Multi-Modal Data and AI Technologies in Medical Diagnosis (2024) · cites this paper as [57]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2016) · 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2016.90 · Cited by 235,474 · see citing works
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L., & Polosukhin, I. (2017) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1706.03762 · Cited by 120,404 · see citing works
Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997) · Neural Computation · doi:10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735 · Cited by 102,318 · see citing works
Cortes, C., & Vapnik, V. (1995) · Machine Learning · doi:10.1007/bf00994018 · Cited by 59,421 · see citing works
Densely Connected Convolutional Networks
Huang, G., Liu, Z., Van Der Maaten, L., & Weinberger, K. Q. (2017) · 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2017.243 · Cited by 48,566 · see citing works
Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection
Lin, T.-Y., Dollar, P., Girshick, R., He, K., Hariharan, B., & Belongie, S. (2017) · 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2017.106 · Cited by 30,939 · see citing works
CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module
Woo, S., Park, J., Lee, J.-Y., & Kweon, I. S. (2018) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-01234-2_1 · Cited by 25,853 · see citing works
Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate
Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., & Bengio, Y. (2014) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1409.0473 · Cited by 16,213 · see citing works
Elman, J. L. (1990) · Cognitive Science · doi:10.1207/s15516709cog1402_1 · Cited by 11,212 · see citing works
MEME SUITE: tools for motif discovery and searching
Bailey, T. L., Boden, M., Buske, F. A., Frith, M., Grant, C. E., Clementi, L., Ren, J., Li, W. W., & Noble, W. S. (2009) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gkp335 · Cited by 10,648 · see citing works
Buenrostro, J. D., Giresi, P. G., Zaba, L. C., Chang, H. Y., & Greenleaf, W. J. (2013) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/nmeth.2688 · Cited by 6,422 · see citing works
(1989) · neural information processing systems · Cited by 3,736 · see citing works
Predicting the sequence specificities of DNA- and RNA-binding proteins by deep learning
Alipanahi, B., Delong, A., Weirauch, M. T., & Frey, B. J. (2015) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/nbt.3300 · Cited by 2,873 · see citing works
Predicting effects of noncoding variants with deep learning–based sequence model
Zhou, J., & Troyanskaya, O. G. (2015) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/nmeth.3547 · Cited by 2,338 · see citing works
A compendium of RNA-binding motifs for decoding gene regulation
Ray, D., Kazan, H., Cook, K. B., Weirauch, M. T., Najafabadi, H. S., Li, X., Gueroussov, S., Albu, M., Zheng, H., Yang, A., et al. (2013) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature12311 · Cited by 1,480 · see citing works
Transcription factors: structural families and principles of DNA recognition.
Pabo, C., & Sauer, R. (1992) · Annual Review of Biochemistry · doi:10.1146/annurev.bi.61.070192.005201 · Cited by 1,445 · see citing works
Ji, Y.-R., Zhou, Z., Liu, H., & Davuluri, R. (2020) · bioRxiv · doi:10.1101/2020.09.17.301879 · Cited by 1,426 · see citing works
Dynamic Regulation of Nucleosome Positioning in the Human Genome
Schones, D. E., Cui, K., Cuddapah, S., Roh, T., Barski, A., Wang, Z., Wei, G., & Zhao, K. (2008) · Cell · doi:10.1016/j.cell.2008.02.022 · Cited by 1,396 · see citing works
Self-citationAttention Augmented Convolutional Networks
Bello, I., Zoph, B., Le, Q. V., Vaswani, A., & Shlens, J. (2019) · IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) · doi:10.1109/iccv.2019.00338 · Cited by 1,320 · see citing works
Ji, Y., Zhou, Z., Liu, H., & Davuluri, R. V. (2021) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btab083 · Cited by 1,303 · see citing works
BAM: Bottleneck Attention ModulePreprint
Park, J., Woo, S., Lee, J., & Kweon, I. S. (2018) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1807.06514 · Cited by 951 · see citing works
Predicting Parameters in Deep Learning
Denil, M., Shakibi, B., Dinh, L., Ranzato, M., & de Freitas, N. (2013) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1306.0543 · Cited by 853 · see citing works
Quang, D. X., & Xie, X. S. (2016) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gkw226 · Cited by 840 · see citing works
Clark, S. J., Argelaguet, R., Kapourani, C.-A., Stubbs, T. M., Lee, H. J., Alda-Catalinas, C., Krueger, F., Sanguinetti, G., Kelsey, G., Marioni, J. C., et al. (2018) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03149-4 · Cited by 657 · see citing works
Convolutional neural network architectures for predicting DNA–protein binding
Zeng, H., Edwards, M. D., Liu, G., & Gifford, D. K. (2016) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btw255 · Cited by 513 · see citing works
The art and design of genetic screens: RNA interference
Boutros, M., & Ahringer, J. (2008) · Nature reviews genetics · doi:10.1038/nrg2364 · Cited by 498 · see citing works
Enhanced Regulatory Sequence Prediction Using Gapped k-mer Features
Ghandi, M., Lee, D., Mohammad-Noori, M., & Beer, M. (2014) · PLoS Computational Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003711 · Cited by 484 · see citing works
Flexibility and constraint in the nucleosome core landscape of Caenorhabditis elegans chromatinPreprint
Johnson, S., Tan, F. J., McCullough, H. L., Riordan, D. P., & Fire, A. Z. (2006) · Genome Research · doi:10.1101/gr.5560806 · Cited by 197 · see citing works
Scaling description of generalization with number of parameters in deep learning
Geiger, M., Jacot, A., Spigler, S., Gabriel, F., Sagun, L., d’Ascoli, S., Biroli, G., Hongler, C., & Wyart, M. (2020) · Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/ab633c · Cited by 160 · see citing works
Akbar, S., Hayat, M., Tahir, M., Khan, S. A., & Alarfaj, F. K. (2022) · Artificial Intelligence in Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2022.102349 · Cited by 131 · see citing works
DeepSite: bidirectional LSTM and CNN models for predicting DNA–protein binding
Zhang, Y., Qiao, S., Ji, S., & Li, Y. (2019) · International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics · doi:10.1007/s13042-019-00990-x · Cited by 122 · see citing works
Representation learning of genomic sequence motifs with convolutional neural networks
Koo, P. K., & Eddy, S. R. (2019) · PLoS Computational Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007560 · Cited by 112 · see citing works
Zhao, B.-W., Wang, L., Hu, P., Wong, L., Su, X., Wang, B., You, Z., & Hu, L. (2023) · IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing · doi:10.1109/tetc.2023.3239949 · Cited by 111 · see citing works
A survey on deep learning in DNA/RNA motif mining
He, Y., Shen, Z., Zhang, Q., Wang, S., & Huang, D.-S. (2020) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbaa229 · Cited by 104 · see citing works
Akbar, S., Khan, S. A., Ali, F., Hayat, M., Qasim, M., & Gul, S. (2020) · Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems · doi:10.1016/j.chemolab.2020.104103 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
Attend and Predict: Understanding Gene Regulation by Selective Attention on ChromatinPreprint
Singh, R., Lanchantin, J., Sekhon, A., & Qi, Y. (2018) · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · doi:10.1101/329334 · Cited by 93 · see citing works
Akbar, S., Ahmad, A., Hayat, M., Rehman, A. U., Khan, S. A., & Ali, F. (2021) · Computers in Biology and Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.compbiomed.2021.104778 · Cited by 93 · see citing works
Dilated Convolutions for Modeling Long-Distance Genomic DependenciesPreprint
Gupta, A., & Rush, A. M. (2017) · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · doi:10.1101/200857 · Cited by 60 · see citing works
SAResNet: self-attention residual network for predicting DNA-protein binding
Shen, L.-C., Liu, Y., Song, J., & Yu, D. (2021) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbab101 · Cited by 52 · see citing works
Zhang, Y., Wang, Z., Zeng, Y., Liu, Y., Xiong, S., Wang, M., Zhou, J., & Zou, Q. (2021) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbab525 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Self-citationDNA Testing and Molecular Screening for Colon Cancer
Carethers, J. M. (2013) · Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology · doi:10.1016/j.cgh.2013.12.007 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
Akbar, S., Hayat, M., Iqbal, M. J., & Tahir, M. (2019) · Frontiers of Computer Science · doi:10.1007/s11704-018-8094-9 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Raza, A., Alam, W., Khan, S., Tahir, M., & Chong, K. T. (2023) · IEEE Access · doi:10.1109/access.2023.3285197 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
He, Y.-Z., Yang, Y., Su, X., Zhao, B.-W., Xiong, S., & Hu, L. (2022) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbac562 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Representation Learning of Genomic Sequence Motifs with Convolutional Neural NetworksPreprint
Koo, P. K., & Eddy, S. R. (2018) · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · doi:10.1101/362756 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Salekin, S., Zhang, J. M., & Huang, Y. (2017) · IEEE EMBS International Conference on Biomedical & Health Informatics (BHI) · doi:10.1109/bhi.2017.7897204 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
Self-citationDilated Convolutions for Modeling Long-Distance Genomic DependenciesPreprint
Gupta, A., & Rush, A. M. (2017) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1710.01278 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 2
- [23]Yu D-J, Zhu Y-H, Bao X-R. DeepTF: Accurate prediction of transcription factor binding sites by combining multi-scale convolution and long short-term memory neural network. In: International Conference on Intelligent Science and Big Data Engineering; 2019.
- [34]So D, Le Q, Liang C. The evolved transformer. In: International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR; 2019
Cited by
Sorted by citations
A Comprehensive Review on Synergy of Multi-Modal Data and AI Technologies in Medical Diagnosis
Xu, X., Li, J., Zhu, Z., Zhao, L., Wang, H., Song, C., Chen, Y., Zhao, Q., Yang, J., & Pei, Y. (2024) · Bioengineering · doi:10.3390/bioengineering11030219 · Cited by 242 · see citing works
Self-citationA combined deep CNN-RNN network for rainfall-runoff modelling in Bardha Watershed, India
Shekar, P. R., Mathew, A., Yeswanth, P. V., & Deivalakshmi, S. (2024) · Artificial Intelligence in Geosciences · doi:10.1016/j.aiig.2024.100073 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Babichev, S. A., Liakh, I., & Kalinina, I. (2023) · Applied Sciences · doi:10.3390/app132111823 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Li, W., Li, L., Liu, S., Song, X., & Li, Z. (2025) · IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering · doi:10.1109/tase.2025.3562381 · Cited by 10 · see citing works
Identifying transcription factors with cell-type specific DNA binding signatures
Awdeh, A., Turcotte, M., & Perkins, T. J. (2024) · BMC Genomics · doi:10.1186/s12864-024-10859-1 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
N-GlycoPred: A hybrid deep learning model for accurate identification of N-glycosylation sites
Hu, F., Gao, J., Zheng, J., Kwoh, C. K., & Jia, C. (2024) · Methods · doi:10.1016/j.ymeth.2024.05.002 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
BCDB: A dual-branch network based on transformer for predicting transcription factor binding sites
He, J., Zhang, Y., Liu, Y., Zhou, Z., Li, T., Zhang, Y., & Xie, B. (2024) · Methods · doi:10.1016/j.ymeth.2024.12.006 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
PCVR: a pre-trained contextualized visual representation for DNA sequence classification
Zhou, J., Wu, H., Du, K., Zhou, W., Zhou, C., & Li, H. (2025) · BMC Bioinformatics · doi:10.1186/s12859-025-06136-x · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Single-Source Dual-Stream Representation Learning for DNA Sequence Classification
Zhou, J., Zhang, Z., Wang, M., Zhou, W., & Li, H. (2025) · International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval · doi:10.1145/3731715.3733433 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
CapsuleNet-enhanced multi-modal model for false news detection: A qualitative analysis
Li, C. (2025) · Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering · doi:10.1177/14727978251361541
Shilpa, M., Nandini, C., & Sandeep, M. (2025) · International Conference on Sustainability, Innovation & Technology (ICSIT) · doi:10.1109/icsit65336.2025.11295113
Dai, Y., Lu, S., Fan, J., Qiao, M., Zhu, Y., Zhao, E., & Zhang, H. (2026) · Plants · doi:10.3390/plants15020178
An enhanced transformer model for detecting 1p36 deletion syndrome
Mercy, I., Shanmugam, R., & Chidambaram, M. (2026) · Molecular Genetics and Genomics · doi:10.1007/s00438-026-02403-5
GNNMOTIF: A Deep Graph Neural Network Framework for Motif Identification
Shilpa, M., Nandini, C., Shukla, K. S., Viqar, M., Khan, M. S., & Prateeksha, R. Y. (2026) · International Conference on Computing for Sustainability and Intelligent Future (COMP-SIF) · doi:10.1109/comp-sif69752.2026.11481931
VIRGO-Motif: A Hybrid Stacked Ensemble and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Motif Discovery
Shilpa, M., & Nandini, C. (2026) · Engineering Technology & Applied Science Research · doi:10.48084/etasr.19292
- Authors
- Zhang, J., Liu, B., Wu, J., Wang, Z., & Li, J.
- Affiliations
- Beijing University of Technology (CN)
- Massey University (NZ)
- Corresponding author
- Liu, Bo
- Venue
- BMC Bioinformatics
- Published
- 2023-09-18
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 345-345
- ISSN
- 1471-2105 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC10506269
- OpenAlex
- W4386835737
- Cited by
- 15
- References
- 42
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 1
- FWCI
- 1.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- BMC Bioinformatics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (62076015)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Keywords
- multi-head self-attention, convolutional neural networks, parameter-efficient models, protein sequence classification, gene expression, long-range dependencies
- MeSH terms
- Deep Learning, DNA, Transcription Factors, Neural Networks, Computer, Computational Biology
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review