PETModule: a motif module based approach for enhancer target gene prediction

The identification of enhancer-target gene (ETG) pairs is vital for the understanding of gene transcriptional regulation. Experimental approaches such as Hi-C have generated valuable resources of ETG pairs. Several computational methods have also been developed to successfully predict ETG interactions. Despite these progresses, high-throughput experimental approaches are still costly and existing computational approaches are still suboptimal and not easy to apply. Here we developed a motif module based approach called PETModule that predicts ETG pairs. Tested on eight human cell types and two mouse cell types, we showed that a large number of our predictions were supported by Hi-C and/or ChIA-PET experiments. Compared with two recently developed approaches for ETG pair prediction, we shown that PETModule had a much better recall, a similar or better F1 score, and a larger area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. The PETModule tool is freely available at http://hulab.ucf.edu/research/projects/PETModule/.