A dynamic Bayesian network approach to protein secondary structure prediction

In this paper, we report a new method of probabilistic nature for protein secondary structure prediction, based on dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN). The new method models the PSI-BLAST profile of a protein sequence using a multivariate Gaussian distribution, and simultaneously takes into account the dependency between the profile and secondary structure and the dependency between profiles of neighboring residues. In addition, a segment length distribution is introduced for each secondary structure state. Tests show that the DBN method has made a significant improvement in the accuracy compared to other pure HMM-type methods. Further improvement is achieved by combining the DBN with an NN, a method called DBNN, which shows better Q3 accuracy than many popular methods and is competitive to the current state-of-the-arts. The most interesting feature of DBN/DBNN is that a significant improvement in the prediction accuracy is achieved when combined with other methods by a simple consensus.The DBN method using a Gaussian distribution for the PSI-BLAST profile and a high-ordered dependency between profiles of neighboring residues produces significantly better prediction accuracy than other HMM-type probabilistic methods. Owing to their different nature, the DBN and NN combine to form a more accurate method DBNN. Future improvement may be achieved by combining DBNN with a method of SVM type.Over past decades, the prediction accuracy of protein secondary structure has gained some improvements, largely due to the successful application of machine learning tools such as neural network (NN) and support vector machine (SVM). Qian and Sejnowski designed one of the earliest NN methods [1]. Rost and Sander introduced the alignment profile with multiple sequence alignment into the prediction. Their method, named as PHD, performed much better than previous ones, because of the use of alignment profile as the network's input [2]. Jones made an important improvement by pioneering the us