15,659 research outputs found
Identification of functionally related enzymes by learning-to-rank methods
Enzyme sequences and structures are routinely used in the biological sciences
as queries to search for functionally related enzymes in online databases. To
this end, one usually departs from some notion of similarity, comparing two
enzymes by looking for correspondences in their sequences, structures or
surfaces. For a given query, the search operation results in a ranking of the
enzymes in the database, from very similar to dissimilar enzymes, while
information about the biological function of annotated database enzymes is
ignored.
In this work we show that rankings of that kind can be substantially improved
by applying kernel-based learning algorithms. This approach enables the
detection of statistical dependencies between similarities of the active cleft
and the biological function of annotated enzymes. This is in contrast to
search-based approaches, which do not take annotated training data into
account. Similarity measures based on the active cleft are known to outperform
sequence-based or structure-based measures under certain conditions. We
consider the Enzyme Commission (EC) classification hierarchy for obtaining
annotated enzymes during the training phase. The results of a set of sizeable
experiments indicate a consistent and significant improvement for a set of
similarity measures that exploit information about small cavities in the
surface of enzymes
Efficient Regularized Least-Squares Algorithms for Conditional Ranking on Relational Data
In domains like bioinformatics, information retrieval and social network
analysis, one can find learning tasks where the goal consists of inferring a
ranking of objects, conditioned on a particular target object. We present a
general kernel framework for learning conditional rankings from various types
of relational data, where rankings can be conditioned on unseen data objects.
We propose efficient algorithms for conditional ranking by optimizing squared
regression and ranking loss functions. We show theoretically, that learning
with the ranking loss is likely to generalize better than with the regression
loss. Further, we prove that symmetry or reciprocity properties of relations
can be efficiently enforced in the learned models. Experiments on synthetic and
real-world data illustrate that the proposed methods deliver state-of-the-art
performance in terms of predictive power and computational efficiency.
Moreover, we also show empirically that incorporating symmetry or reciprocity
properties can improve the generalization performance
Kernel methods in machine learning
We review machine learning methods employing positive definite kernels. These
methods formulate learning and estimation problems in a reproducing kernel
Hilbert space (RKHS) of functions defined on the data domain, expanded in terms
of a kernel. Working in linear spaces of function has the benefit of
facilitating the construction and analysis of learning algorithms while at the
same time allowing large classes of functions. The latter include nonlinear
functions as well as functions defined on nonvectorial data. We cover a wide
range of methods, ranging from binary classifiers to sophisticated methods for
estimation with structured data.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053607000000677 the
Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
- …