15,944 research outputs found
An empirical comparison of supervised machine learning techniques in bioinformatics
Research in bioinformatics is driven by the experimental data.
Current biological databases are populated by vast amounts of
experimental data. Machine learning has been widely applied to
bioinformatics and has gained a lot of success in this research
area. At present, with various learning algorithms available in the
literature, researchers are facing difficulties in choosing the best
method that can apply to their data. We performed an empirical
study on 7 individual learning systems and 9 different combined
methods on 4 different biological data sets, and provide some
suggested issues to be considered when answering the following
questions: (i) How does one choose which algorithm is best
suitable for their data set? (ii) Are combined methods better than
a single approach? (iii) How does one compare the effectiveness
of a particular algorithm to the others
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Multi-class protein fold classification using a new ensemble machine learning approach.
Protein structure classification represents an important process in understanding the associations
between sequence and structure as well as possible functional and evolutionary relationships.
Recent structural genomics initiatives and other high-throughput experiments have populated the
biological databases at a rapid pace. The amount of structural data has made traditional methods
such as manual inspection of the protein structure become impossible. Machine learning has been
widely applied to bioinformatics and has gained a lot of success in this research area. This work
proposes a novel ensemble machine learning method that improves the coverage of the classifiers
under the multi-class imbalanced sample sets by integrating knowledge induced from different base
classifiers, and we illustrate this idea in classifying multi-class SCOP protein fold data. We have
compared our approach with PART and show that our method improves the sensitivity of the
classifier in protein fold classification. Furthermore, we have extended this method to learning over
multiple data types, preserving the independence of their corresponding data sources, and show
that our new approach performs at least as well as the traditional technique over a single joined
data source. These experimental results are encouraging, and can be applied to other bioinformatics
problems similarly characterised by multi-class imbalanced data sets held in multiple data
sources
Applicability of semi-supervised learning assumptions for gene ontology terms prediction
Gene Ontology (GO) is one of the most important resources in bioinformatics, aiming to provide a unified framework for the biological annotation of genes and proteins across all species. Predicting GO terms is an essential task for bioinformatics, but the number of available labelled proteins is in several cases insufficient for training reliable machine learning classifiers. Semi-supervised learning methods arise as a powerful solution that explodes the information contained in unlabelled data in order to improve the estimations of traditional supervised approaches. However, semi-supervised learning methods have to make strong assumptions about the nature of the training data and thus, the performance of the predictor is highly dependent on these assumptions. This paper presents an analysis of the applicability of semi-supervised learning assumptions over the specific task of GO terms prediction, focused on providing judgment elements that allow choosing the most suitable tools for specific GO terms. The results show that semi-supervised approaches significantly outperform the traditional supervised methods and that the highest performances are reached when applying the cluster assumption. Besides, it is experimentally demonstrated that cluster and manifold assumptions are complimentary to each other and an analysis of which GO terms can be more prone to be correctly predicted with each assumption, is provided.Postprint (published version
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