Studying the function of proteins is important for understanding the
molecular mechanisms of life. The number of publicly available protein
structures has increasingly become extremely large. Still, the determination of
the function of a protein structure remains a difficult, costly, and time
consuming task. The difficulties are often due to the essential role of spatial
and topological structures in the determination of protein functions in living
cells. In this paper, we propose ProtNN, a novel approach for protein function
prediction. Given an unannotated protein structure and a set of annotated
proteins, ProtNN finds the nearest neighbor annotated structures based on
protein-graph pairwise similarities. Given a query protein, ProtNN finds the
nearest neighbor reference proteins based on a graph representation model and a
pairwise similarity between vector embedding of both query and reference
protein-graphs in structural and topological spaces. ProtNN assigns to the
query protein the function with the highest number of votes across the set of k
nearest neighbor reference proteins, where k is a user-defined parameter.
Experimental evaluation demonstrates that ProtNN is able to accurately classify
several datasets in an extremely fast runtime compared to state-of-the-art
approaches. We further show that ProtNN is able to scale up to a whole PDB
dataset in a single-process mode with no parallelization, with a gain of
thousands order of magnitude of runtime compared to state-of-the-art
approaches