Feature Selection for Protein Dihedral Angle Prediction

Abstract

Three-dimensional structure prediction has crucial importance for bioinformatics and theoretical chemistry. One of the main steps of three-dimensional structure prediction is dihedral (torsion) angle prediction. As new feature extraction methods are developed the dimension of the input space increases considerably yielding longer model training and less accurate models due to noisy or redundant features. In this study, feature selection is employed for dimensionality reduction on one of the established benchmarks of protein 1D structure prediction. Experimental results show that the feature selection improves the accuracy of protein dihedral angle class prediction by 2% and can eliminate up to %82 of the features when random forest classifier is used. Accurate prediction of dihedral angles will eventually contribute to protein structure prediction.