JASPAR (http://jaspar.genereg.net/) is an open-access database containing manually curated, non-redundant transcription factor (TF) binding profiles for TFs across six taxonomic groups. In this 9th release, we expanded the CORE collection with 341 new profiles (148 for plants, 101 for vertebrates, 85 for urochordates, and 7 for insects), which corresponds to a 19% expansion over the previous release. We added 298 new profiles to the Unvalidated collection when no orthogonal evidence was found in the literature. All the profiles were clustered to provide familial binding profiles for each taxonomic group. Moreover, we revised the structural classification of DNA binding domains to consider plant-specific TFs. This release introduces word clouds to represent the scientific knowledge associated with each TF. We updated the genome tracks of TFBSs predicted with JASPAR profiles in eight organisms; the human and mouse TFBS predictions can be visualized as native tracks in the UCSC Genome Browser. Finally, we provide a new tool to perform JASPAR TFBS enrichment analysis in user-provided genomic regions. All the data is accessible through the JASPAR website, its associated RESTful API, the R/Bioconductor data package, and a new Python package, pyJASPAR, that facilitates serverless access to the data.

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Sparse linear models approximate target variable(s) by a sparse linear combination of input variables. Since they are simple, fast, and able to select features, they are widely used in classification and regression. Essentially they are shallow feed-forward neural networks that have three limitations: (1) incompatibility to model nonlinearity of features, (2) inability to learn high-level features, and (3) unnatural extensions to select features in a multiclass case. Deep neural networks are models structured by multiple hidden layers with nonlinear activation functions. Compared with linear models, they have two distinctive strengths: the capability to (1) model complex systems with nonlinear structures and (2) learn high-level representation of features. Deep learning has been applied in many large and complex systems where deep models significantly outperform shallow ones. However, feature selection at the input level, which is very helpful to understand the nature of a complex system, is still not well studied. In genome research, the cis-regulatory elements in noncoding DNA sequences play a key role in the expression of genes. Since the activity of regulatory elements involves highly interactive factors, a deep tool is strongly needed to discover informative features. In order to address the above limitations of shallow and deep models for selecting features of a complex system, we propose a deep feature selection (DFS) model that (1) takes advantages of deep structures to model nonlinearity and (2) conveniently selects a subset of features right at the input level for multiclass data. Simulation experiments convince us that this model is able to correctly identify both linear and nonlinear features. We applied this model to the identification of active enhancers and promoters by integrating multiple sources of genomic information. Results show that our model outperforms elastic net in terms of size of discriminative feature subset and classification accuracy.