Semi-Supervised Protein Classification Using Cluster Kernels

Abstract

This chapter describes an experimental study of large-scale semi-supervised learning for the problem of protein classification. The protein classification problem, a central problem in computational biology, is to predict the structural class of a protein given its amino acid sequence. Such a classification helps biologists to understand the function of a protein. Building an accurate protein classification system, as with many tasks, depends critically upon choosing a good representation of the input sequences of amino acids. Early work using string kernels with support vector machines (SVMs) for protein classification achieved state-of-the-art classification performance. However, such representations are based only on labeled data—examples with known three-dimensional (3D) structures, organized into structural classes-while in practice, unlabeled data are far more plentiful.