A three-way approach for protein function classification

PLoS One. 2017 Feb 24;12(2):e0171702. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171702. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

The knowledge of protein functions plays an essential role in understanding biological cells and has a significant impact on human life in areas such as personalized medicine, better crops and improved therapeutic interventions. Due to expense and inherent difficulty of biological experiments, intelligent methods are generally relied upon for automatic assignment of functions to proteins. The technological advancements in the field of biology are improving our understanding of biological processes and are regularly resulting in new features and characteristics that better describe the role of proteins. It is inevitable to neglect and overlook these anticipated features in designing more effective classification techniques. A key issue in this context, that is not being sufficiently addressed, is how to build effective classification models and approaches for protein function prediction by incorporating and taking advantage from the ever evolving biological information. In this article, we propose a three-way decision making approach which provides provisions for seeking and incorporating future information. We considered probabilistic rough sets based models such as Game-Theoretic Rough Sets (GTRS) and Information-Theoretic Rough Sets (ITRS) for inducing three-way decisions. An architecture of protein functions classification with probabilistic rough sets based three-way decisions is proposed and explained. Experiments are carried out on Saccharomyces cerevisiae species dataset obtained from Uniprot database with the corresponding functional classes extracted from the Gene Ontology (GO) database. The results indicate that as the level of biological information increases, the number of deferred cases are reduced while maintaining similar level of accuracy.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Databases, Genetic
  • Databases, Protein
  • Gene Expression
  • Gene Ontology
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Protein Interaction Domains and Motifs
  • Protein Interaction Mapping
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / genetics
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / metabolism*
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins / chemistry
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins / physiology*

Substances

  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins

Grants and funding

The third author was partially supported by Discovery Grant from NSERC Canada. We are also thankful to the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan for providing student grant under the SRGP (Startup Research Grant Program) initiative. There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.