Performance evaluation for MOTIFSIM

BACKGROUND: Previous studies show various results obtained from different motif finders for an identical dataset. This is largely due to the fact that these tools use different strategies and possess unique features for discovering the motifs. Hence, using multiple tools and methods has been suggested because the motifs commonly reported by them are more likely to be biologically significant. RESULTS: The common significant motifs from multiple tools can be obtained by using MOTIFSIM tool. In this work, we evaluated the performance of MOTIFSIM in three aspects. First, we compared the pair-wise comparison technique of MOTIFSIM with the un-gapped Smith-Waterman algorithm and four common distance metrics: average Kullback-Leibler, average log-likelihood ratio, Chi-Square distance, and Pearson Correlation Coefficient. Second, we compared the performance of MOTIFSIM with RSAT Matrix-clustering tool for motif clustering. Lastly, we evaluated the performances of nineteen motif finders and the reliability of MOTIFSIM for identifying the common significant motifs from multiple tools. CONCLUSIONS: The pair-wise comparison results reveal that MOTIFSIM attains better performance than the un-gapped Smith-Waterman algorithm and four distance metrics. The clustering results also demonstrate that MOTIFSIM achieves similar or even better performance than RSAT Matrix-clustering. Furthermore, the findings indicate if the motif detection does not require a special tool for detecting a specific type of motif then using multiple motif finders and combining with MOTIFSIM for obtaining the common significant motifs, it improved the results for DNA motif detection. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12575-018-0088-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.