An Extended Local Hierarchical Classifier for Prediction of Protein and Gene Functions

Gene function prediction and protein function prediction are complex classification problems where the functional classes are structured according to a predefined hierarchy. To solve these problems, we propose an extended local hierarchical Naive Bayes classifier, where a binary classifier is built for each class in the hierarchy. The extension to conventional local approaches is that each classifier considers both the parent and child classes of the current class. We have evaluated the proposed approach on eight protein function and ten gene function hierarchical classification datasets. The proposed approach achieved somewhat better predictive accuracies than a global hierarchical Naive Bayes classifier.