Knowing the location of a protein within the cell is important for
understanding its function, role in biological processes, and potential use as
a drug target. Much progress has been made in developing computational methods
that predict single locations for proteins, assuming that proteins localize to
a single location. However, it has been shown that proteins localize to
multiple locations. While a few recent systems have attempted to predict
multiple locations of proteins, they typically treat locations as independent
or capture inter-dependencies by treating each locations-combination present in
the training set as an individual location-class. We present a new method and a
preliminary system we have developed that directly incorporates
inter-dependencies among locations into the multiple-location-prediction
process, using a collection of Bayesian network classifiers. We evaluate our
system on a dataset of single- and multi-localized proteins. Our results,
obtained by incorporating inter-dependencies are significantly higher than
those obtained by classifiers that do not use inter-dependencies. The
performance of our system on multi-localized proteins is comparable to a top
performing system (YLoc+), without restricting predictions to be based only on
location-combinations present in the training set.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on
Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013