title: Application of learning to rank to protein remote homology detection.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Protein remote homology detection is one of the fundamental problems in computational biology, aiming to find protein sequences in a database of known structures that are evolutionarily related to a given query protein. Some computational methods treat this problem as a ranking problem and achieve the state-of-the-art performance, such as PSI-BLAST, HHblits and ProtEmbed. This raises the possibility to combine these methods to improve the predictive performance. In this regard, we are to propose a new computational method called ProtDec-LTR for protein remote homology detection, which is able to combine various ranking methods in a supervised manner via using the Learning to Rank (LTR) algorithm derived from natural language processing.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Experimental results on a widely used benchmark dataset showed that ProtDec-LTR can achieve an ROC1 score of 0.8442 and an ROC50 score of 0.9023 outperforming all the individual predictors and some state-of-the-art methods. These results indicate that it is correct to treat protein remote homology detection as a ranking problem, and predictive performance improvement can be achieved by combining different ranking approaches in a supervised manner via using LTR.
  
  
  METHODS
  For users' convenience, the software tools of three basic ranking predictors and Learning to Rank algorithm were provided at http://bioinformatics.hitsz.edu.cn/ProtDec-LTR/home/
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  bliu@insun.hit.edu.cn
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Key Laboratory of Network Oriented Intelligent Computation, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China and Gordon Life Science Institute, Belmont, MA 02478, USA.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology.
authors.forename: Junjie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Key Laboratory of Network Oriented Intelligent Computation, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China and.
authors.forename: Xiaolong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D030562:Databases, Protein; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein / Q000379:methods*; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D012984:Software