Markov chains can be used to identify CpG islands in DNA sequences. A Markov chain model is trained on known CpG islands to estimate transition probabilities between nucleotides. Given a new sequence, its likelihood of being generated by the CpG island Markov chain model versus a background model is calculated. If the log likelihood ratio is greater than 0, the sequence is predicted to be a CpG island. This approach models the dependencies between adjacent nucleotides and allows probabilistic classification of sequences.