Protein structural class prediction using predicted secondary structure and hydropathy profile

This thesis explores machine learning models based on various feature sets to solve the protein structural class prediction problem which is a significant classification problem in bioinformatics. Knowledge of protein structural classes contributes to an understanding of protein folding patterns, and this has made structural class prediction research a major topic of interest. In this thesis, features are extracted from predicted secondary structure and hydropathy sequence using new strategies to classify proteins into one of the four major structural classes: all-α, all-β, α/β, and α+β. The prediction accuracy using these features compares favourably with some existing successful methods. We use Support Vector Machines (SVM), since this learning method has well-known efficiency in solving this classification problem. On a standard dataset (25PDB), the proposed system has an overall accuracy of 89% with as few as 22 features, whereas the previous best performing method had an accuracy of 88% using 2510 features.