Predicting secondary structure of all-helical proteins using hidden markov support vector machines

Abstract

Our goal is to develop a state-of-the-art secondary structure predictor with an intuitive and biophysically-motivated energy model through the use of Hidden Markov Support Vector Machines (HM-SVMs), a recent innovation in the field of machine learning. We focus on the prediction of alpha helices and show that by using HM-SVMs, a simple 7-state HMM with 302 parameters can achieve a Qα value of 77.6% and a SOVα value of 73.4%. As detailed in an accompanying technical report [11], these performance numbers are among the best for techniques that do not rely on external databases (such as multiple sequence alignments). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.