The work undertaken within this thesis is towards the development of a representative set of sequence driven features for the prediction of structural classes of proteins. Proteins are biological molecules that make living things function, to determine the function of a protein the structure must be known because the structure dictates its physical capabilities. A protein is generally classified into one of the four main structural classes, namely all-α, all-β, α + β or α / β, which are based on the arrangements and gross content of the secondary structure elements. Current methods manually assign the structural classes to the protein by manual inspection, which is a slow process. In order to address the problem, this thesis is concerned with the development of automated prediction of structural classes of proteins and extraction of a small but robust set of sequence driven features by using the amino acid indices. The first main study undertook a comprehensive analysis of the largest collection of sequence driven features, which includes an existing set of 1479 descriptor values grouped by ten different feature groups. The results show that composition based feature groups are the most representative towards the four main structural classes, achieving a predictive accuracy of 63.87%. This finding led to the second main study, development of the generalised amino acid composition method (GAAC), where amino acid index values are used to weigh corresponding amino acids. GAAC method results in a higher accuracy of 68.02%. The third study was to refine the amino acid indices database, which resulted in the highest accuracy of 75.52%. The main contributions from this thesis are the development of four computationally extracted sequence driven feature-sets based on the underused amino acid indices. Two of these methods, GAAC and the hybrid method have shown improvement over the usage of traditional sequence driven features in the context of smaller and refined feature sizes and classification accuracy. The development of six non-redundant novel sets of the amino acid indices dataset, of which each are more representative than the original database. Finally, the construction of two large 25% and 40% homology datasets consisting over 5000 and 7000 protein samples, respectively. A public webserver has been developed located at http://www.generalised-protein-sequence-features.com, which allows biologists and bioinformaticians to extract GAAC sequence driven features from any inputted protein sequence.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:56:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ValnaideGB.pdf: 1369975 bytes, checksum: 404710d72240200cbd30a9116933d340 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-11-25 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / Nowadays, classifying proteins in structural classes, which concerns the inference of patterns in their 3D conformation, is one of the most important open problems in Molecular Biology. The main reason for this is that the function of a protein is intrinsically related to its spatial conformation. However, such conformations are very difficult to be obtained experimentally in laboratory. Thus, this problem has drawn the attention of many researchers in Bioinformatics. Considering the great difference between the number of protein sequences already known and the number of three-dimensional structures determined experimentally, the demand of automated techniques for structural classification of proteins is very high. In this context, computational tools, especially Machine Learning (ML) techniques, have become essential to deal with this problem. In this work, ML techniques are used in the recognition of protein structural classes: Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbor, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine and Neural Networks. These methods have been chosen because they represent different paradigms of learning and have been widely used in the Bioinfornmatics literature. Aiming to obtain an improvment in the performance of these techniques (individual classifiers), homogeneous (Bagging and Boosting) and heterogeneous (Voting, Stacking and StackingC) multiclassification systems are used. Moreover, since the protein database used in this work presents the problem of imbalanced classes, artificial techniques for class balance (Undersampling Random, Tomek Links, CNN, NCL and OSS) are used to minimize such a problem. In order to evaluate the ML methods, a cross-validation procedure is applied, where the accuracy of the classifiers is measured using the mean of classification error rate, on independent test sets. These means are compared, two by two, by the hypothesis test aiming to evaluate if there is, statistically, a significant difference between them. With respect to the results obtained with the individual classifiers, Support Vector Machine presented the best accuracy. In terms of the multi-classification systems (homogeneous and heterogeneous), they showed, in general, a superior or similar performance when compared to the one achieved by the individual classifiers used - especially Boosting with Decision Tree and the StackingC with Linear Regression as meta classifier. The Voting method, despite of its simplicity, has shown to be adequate for solving the problem presented in this work. The techniques for class balance, on the other hand, have not produced a significant improvement in the global classification error. Nevertheless, the use of such techniques did improve the classification error for the minority class. In this context, the NCL technique has shown to be more appropriated / Atualmente, a classifica??o estrutural de prote?nas, que diz respeito ? infer?ncia de padr?es em sua conforma??o 3D, ? um dos principais problemas em aberto da Biologia Molecular. Esse problema vem recebendo a aten??o de muitos pesquisadores na ?rea de Bioinform?tica pelo fato de as fun??es das prote?nas estarem intrinsecamente relacionadas ?s suas diferentes conforma??es espaciais, que s?o de dif?cil obten??o experimental em laborat?rio. Considerando a grande diferen?a entre o n?mero de seq??ncias de prote?nas conhecidas e o n?mero de estruturas tridimensionais determinadas experimentalmente, ? alta a demanda por t?cnicas automatizadas de classifica??o estrutural de prote?nas. Nesse contexto, as ferramentas computacionais, principalmente as t?cnicas de Aprendizado de M?quina (AM), tornaram-se alternativas essenciais para tratar esse problema. Neste trabalho, t?cnicas de AM s?o empregadas no reconhecimento de classes estruturais de prote?nas: ?rvore de Decis?o, k-Vizinhos Mais Pr?ximos, Na?ve Bayes, M?quinas de Vetores Suporte e Redes Neurais Artificiais. Esses m?todos foram escolhidos por representarem diferentes paradigmas de aprendizado e serem bastante citados na literatura. Visando conseguir uma melhoria de desempenho na solu??o do problema abordado, sistemas de multiclassifica??o homog?nea (Bagging e Boosting) e heterog?nea (Voting, Stacking e StackingC) s?o aplicados nesta pesquisa, usando como base as t?cnicas de AM anteriormente mencionadas. Al?m disso, pelo fato de a base de dados de prote?nas considerada neste trabalho apresentar o problema de classes desbalanceadas, t?cnicas artificiais de balanceamento de classes (Under-sampling Aleat?rio, Tomek Links, CNN, NCL e OSS) s?o utilizadas a fim de minimizar esse problema e melhorar o desempenho dos classificadores. Para a avalia??o dos m?todos de AM, um procedimento de valida??o cruzada ? empregado, em que a acur?cia dos classificadores ? medida atrav?s das m?dias da taxa de classifica??o incorreta nos conjuntos de testes independentes. Essas m?dias s?o comparadas duas a duas pelo teste de hip?tese a fim de avaliar se h? diferen?a estatisticamente significativa entre elas. Com os resultados obtidos, pode-se observar, entre os classificadores base, o desempenho superior do m?todo M?quinas de Vetores Suporte. Os sistemas de multiclassifica??o (homog?nea e heterog?nea), por sua vez, apresentaram, em geral, uma acur?cia superior ou similar a dos classificadores usados como base, destacando-se o Boosting que usou ?rvore de Decis?o em sua forma??o e o StackingC tendo como meta classificador a Regress?o Linear. O m?todo Voting, apesar de sua simplicidade, tamb?m mostrou-se adequado para a solu??o do problema considerado nesta disserta??o. Em rela??o ?s t?cnicas de balanceamento de classes, n?o foram alcan?ados melhores resultados de classifica??o global com as bases de dados obtidas com a aplica??o de tais t?cnicas. No entanto, foi poss?vel uma melhor classifica??o espec?fica da classe minorit?ria, de dif?cil aprendizado. A t?cnica NCL foi a que se mostrou mais apropriada ao balanceamento de classes da base de dados de prote?nas