Skip Navigation

Semi-supervised protein classification using cluster kernels

  1. William Stafford Noble4
  1. 1NEC Research Institute 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA
  2. 2Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia University Interchuch Center, 475 Riverside Drive, Mail Code 7717, New York, NY 10115, USA
  3. 3Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics Spemannstraße 38, 72076 Tübingen, Gxermany
  4. 4Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington 1705 NE Pacific Street, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
  1. *To whom correspondence should be addressed.
  • Received January 2, 2005.
  • Accepted May 12, 2005.
  • Revision received April 26, 2005.

Abstract

Motivation: Building an accurate protein classification system depends critically upon choosing a good representation of the input sequences of amino acids. Recent work using string kernels for protein data has achieved state-of-the-art classification performance. However, such representations are based only on labeled data—examples with known 3D structures, organized into structural classes—whereas in practice, unlabeled data are far more plentiful.

Results: In this work, we develop simple and scalable cluster kernel techniques for incorporating unlabeled data into the representation of protein sequences. We show that our methods greatly improve the classification performance of string kernels and outperform standard approaches for using unlabeled data, such as adding close homologs of the positive examples to the training data. We achieve equal or superior performance to previously presented cluster kernel methods and at the same time achieving far greater computationalefficiency.

Availability: Source code is available at www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/bs/people/weston/semiprot. The Spider matlab package is available at www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/bs/people/spider

Contact: jasonw{at}nec-labs.com

Supplementary information: www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/bs/people/weston/semiprot

    | Table of Contents

    Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.