Using informative Multinomial-Dirichlet prior in a t-mixture with reversible jump estimation of nucleosome positions for genome-wide profiling

Genome-wide mapping of nucleosomes has revealed a great deal about the relationships between chromatin structure and control of gene expression. Recent next generation CHIP-chip and CHIP-Seq technologies have accelerated our understanding of basic principles of chromatin organization. These technologies have taught us that nucleosomes play a crucial role in gene regulation by allowing physical access to transcription factors. Recent methods and experimental advancements allow the determination of nucleosome positions for a given genome area. However, most of these methods estimate the number of nucleosomes either by an EM algorithm using a BIC criterion or an effective heuristic strategy. Here, we introduce a Bayesian method for identifying nucleosome positions. The proposed model is based on a Multinomial-Dirichlet classification and a hierarchical mixture distributions. The number and the positions of nucleosomes are estimated using a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation technique. We compare the performance of our method on simulated data and MNase-Seq data from Saccharomyces cerevisiae against PING and NOrMAL methods.