Search code examples
pythonarraysscikit-learnpython-itertoolsone-hot-encoding

How to generate one hot encoding for DNA sequences?


I would like to generate one hot encoding for a set of DNA sequences. For example the sequence ACGTCCA can be represented as below in a transpose manner. But the code below will generate the one hot encoding in horizontal way in which I would prefer it in vertical form. Can anyone help me?

ACGTCCA 
1000001 - A
0100110 - C 
0010000 - G
0001000 - T

Example code:

from sklearn.preprocessing import OneHotEncoder
import itertools

# two example sequences
seqs = ["ACGTCCA","CGGATTG"]


# split sequences to tokens
tokens_seqs = [seq.split("\\") for seq in seqs]

# convert list of of token-lists to one flat list of tokens
# and then create a dictionary that maps word to id of word,
# like {A: 1, B: 2} here
all_tokens = itertools.chain.from_iterable(tokens_seqs)
word_to_id = {token: idx for idx, token in enumerate(set(all_tokens))}

# convert token lists to token-id lists, e.g. [[1, 2], [2, 2]] here
token_ids = [[word_to_id[token] for token in tokens_seq] for tokens_seq in tokens_seqs]

# convert list of token-id lists to one-hot representation
vec = OneHotEncoder(n_values=len(word_to_id))
X = vec.fit_transform(token_ids)

print X.toarray()

However, the code gives me output:

[[ 0.  1.]
 [ 1.  0.]]

Expected output:

[[1. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 0. 1. 1. 0. 0. 0. 1. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 1. 0. 0. 0.]
[0. 0. 0. 1. 0. 0. 0. 1. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 1. 1. 0. 0. 0. 1. 0. 0. 0. 0. 1. 1. 0.]]

Solution

  • I suggest doing it a slightly more manual way:

    import numpy as np
    
    seqs = ["ACGTCCA","CGGATTG"]
    
    CHARS = 'ACGT'
    CHARS_COUNT = len(CHARS)
    
    maxlen = max(map(len, seqs))
    res = np.zeros((len(seqs), CHARS_COUNT * maxlen), dtype=np.uint8)
    
    for si, seq in enumerate(seqs):
        seqlen = len(seq)
        arr = np.chararray((seqlen,), buffer=seq)
        for ii, char in enumerate(CHARS):
            res[si][ii*seqlen:(ii+1)*seqlen][arr == char] = 1
    
    print res
    

    This gives you your desired result:

    [[1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0]
     [0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0]]