PREDICTION OF PROTEIN SECONDARY STRUCTURE USING PROBABILITY BASED FEATURES AND A HYBRID SYSTEM

Abstract

In this paper, we propose some co-occurrence probability-based features for prediction of protein secondary structure. The features are extracted using occurrence/nonoccurrence of secondary structures in the protein sequences. We explore two types of features: position-specific (based on position of amino acid on fragments of protein sequences) as well as position-independent (independent of amino acid position on fragments of protein sequences). We use a hybrid system, NEUROSVM, consisting of neural networks and support vector machines for classification of secondary structures. We propose two schemes NSVMps and NSVM for protein secondary structure prediction. The NSVMps uses position-specific probability-based features and NEUROSVM classifier whereas NSVM uses the same classifier with position-independent probability-based features. The proposed method falls in the single-sequence category of methods because it does not use any sequence profile information such as position specific scoring matrices (PSSM) derived from PSI-BLAST. Two widely used datasets RS126 and CB513 are used in the experiments. The results obtained using the proposed features and NEUROSVM classifier are better than most of the existing single-sequence prediction methods. Most importantly, the results using NSVMps that are obtained using lower dimensional features, are comparable to those by other existing methods. The NSVMps and NSVM are finally tested on target proteins of the critical assessment of protein structure prediction experiment-9 (CASP9). A larger dataset is used to compare the performance of the proposed methods with that of two recent single-sequence prediction methods. We also investigate the impact of presence of different amino acid residues (in protein sequences) that are responsible for the formation of different secondary structures.