Prediction of subcellular localization of proteins using pairwise sequence alignment and support vector machine

Predicting the destination of a protein in a cell gives valuable information for annotating the function of the protein. Recent technological breakthroughs have led us to develop more accurate methods for predicting the subcellular localization of proteins. The most important factor in determining the accuracy of these methods, is a way of extracting useful features from protein sequences. We propose a new method for extracting appropriate features only from the sequence data by computing pairwise sequence alignment scores. As a classifier, support vector machine (SVM) is used. The overall prediction accuracy evaluated by the jackknife validation technique reach 94.70% for the eukaryotic non-plant data set and 92.10% for the eukaryotic plant data set, which show the highest prediction accuracy among methods reported so far with such data sets. Our numerical experimental results confirm that our feature extraction method based on pairwise sequence alignment, is useful for this classification problem.