The Prediction of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins Based on Feature Selection

Intrinsically disordered proteins perform a variety of important biological functions, which makes their accurate prediction useful for a wide range of applications. We develop a scheme for predicting intrinsically disordered proteins by employing 35 features including eight structural properties, seven physicochemical properties and 20 pieces of evolutionary information. In particular, the scheme includes a preprocessing procedure which greatly reduces the input features. Using two different windows, the preprocessed data containing not only the properties of the surroundings of the target residue but also the properties related to the specific target residue are fed into a multi-layer perceptron neural network as its inputs. The Adam algorithm for the back propagation together with the dropout algorithm to avoid overfitting are introduced during the training process. The training as well as testing our procedure is performed on the dataset DIS803 from a DisProt database. The simulation results show that the performance of our scheme is competitive in comparison with ESpritz and IsUnstruct.