Protein fold recognition using an overlapping segmentation approach and a mixture of feature extraction models

Abstract

Protein Fold Recognition (PFR) is considered as a critical step towards the protein structure prediction problem. PFR has also a profound impact on protein function determination and drug design. Despite all the enhancements achieved by using pattern recognition-based approaches in the protein fold recognition, it still remains unsolved and its prediction accuracy remains limited. In this study, we propose a new model based on the concept of mixture of physicochemical and evolutionary features. We then design and develop two novel overlapping segmented-based feature extraction methods. Our proposed methods capture more local and global discriminatory information than previously proposed approaches for this task. We investigate the impact of our novel approaches using the most promising attributes selected from a wide range of physicochemical-based attributes (117 attributes) which is also explored experimentally in this study. By using Support Vector Machine (SVM) our experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement (up to 5.7%) in the protein fold prediction accuracy compared to previously reported results found in the literature. © Springer International Publishing 2013.