Genetic algorithm for an optimized weighted voting scheme incorporating k-separated bigram transition probabilities to improve protein fold recognition

In biology, identifying the tertiary structure of a protein helps determine its functions. A step towards tertiary structure identification is predicting a protein's fold. Computational methods have been applied to determine a protein's fold by assembling information from its structural, physicochemical and/or evolutionary properties. It has been shown that evolutionary data helps improve prediction accuracy. In this study, a scheme is proposed that uses the genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize a weighted voting system to improve protein fold recognition. This scheme incorporates k-separated bigram transition probabilities for feature extraction, which are based on the Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM). A set of SVM classifiers are used for initial classification, whereupon their predictions are consolidated using the optimized weighted voting system. This scheme has been demonstrated on the Ding and Dubchak (DD) benchmarked data set.