A dissimilarity-based multiple instance learning approach for protein remote homology detection

Abstract

We study the problem of Protein Remote Homology Detection, which assesses the functional similarity of two proteins. We approach this as a problem of binary multiple-instance learning (MIL) that aims to distinguish between homologous and non-homologous proteins. The particular MIL approach employed is based on the dissimilarity representation in which various schemes of combining N-gram representations are considered. This approach allows us to cope with longer N-grams, capturing a richer biological context, and results in versatile framework offering competitive performance compared to state of the art.