CrowdGO: Machine learning and semantic similarity guided consensus Gene Ontology annotation

PLoS Comput Biol. 2022 May 13;18(5):e1010075. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010075. eCollection 2022 May.

Abstract

Characterising gene function for the ever-increasing number and diversity of species with annotated genomes relies almost entirely on computational prediction methods. These software are also numerous and diverse, each with different strengths and weaknesses as revealed through community benchmarking efforts. Meta-predictors that assess consensus and conflict from individual algorithms should deliver enhanced functional annotations. To exploit the benefits of meta-approaches, we developed CrowdGO, an open-source consensus-based Gene Ontology (GO) term meta-predictor that employs machine learning models with GO term semantic similarities and information contents. By re-evaluating each gene-term annotation, a consensus dataset is produced with high-scoring confident annotations and low-scoring rejected annotations. Applying CrowdGO to results from a deep learning-based, a sequence similarity-based, and two protein domain-based methods, delivers consensus annotations with improved precision and recall. Furthermore, using standard evaluation measures CrowdGO performance matches that of the community's best performing individual methods. CrowdGO therefore offers a model-informed approach to leverage strengths of individual predictors and produce comprehensive and accurate gene functional annotations.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computational Biology* / methods
  • Consensus
  • Gene Ontology
  • Machine Learning
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation
  • Semantics*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation (https://www.snf.ch/en) grants PP00P3_170664 and PP00P3_202669 to RMW. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.