Prediction of Protein Structural Class Based on Gapped-Dipeptides and a Recursive Feature Selection Approach

The prior knowledge of protein structural class may offer useful clues on understanding its functionality as well as its tertiary structure. Though various significant efforts have been made to find a fast and effective computational approach to address this problem, it is still a challenging topic in the field of bioinformatics. The position-specific score matrix (PSSM) profile has been shown to provide a useful source of information for improving the prediction performance of protein structural class. However, this information has not been adequately explored. To this end, in this study, we present a feature extraction technique which is based on gapped-dipeptides composition computed directly from PSSM. Then, a careful feature selection technique is performed based on support vector machine-recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE). These optimal features are selected to construct a final predictor. The results of jackknife tests on four working datasets show that our method obtains satisfactory prediction accuracies by extracting features solely based on PSSM and could serve as a very promising tool to predict protein structural class.