Multi-objective optimization with majority voting ensemble of classifiers for prediction of HIV-1 protease cleavage site

Abstract

HIV-1 protease cleavage site prediction of an amino acid sequence of Human Immune Deficiency Virus (HIV-1) type 1 has been the subject of intense research for decades to increase the AUC value of the prediction without placing much attention to the accuracy metric by many researchers. Knowledge of the substrate specificity of HIV-1 protease has significant application in HIV-1 protease inhibitors development and in studying novel drug targets. Motivated by this, a multi-objective optimization (MOO)-based majority voting ensemble framework combining the outputs from multiple classifiers has been proposed in the current paper to increase both the prediction accuracy and AUC values simultaneously. The optimal set of classifiers that are considered for voting purposes at the time of combining the outputs is determined automatically using the search capability of MOO. Comparatively better results have been attained using various benchmark data sets with average accuracy and AUC (area under the ROC curve) values of 0.92 and 0.96, respectively.