Feature subset selection for protein subcellular localization prediction

Most of the existing methods for protein subcellular localization prediction are based on a large number of features that are considered to be predictors with large numbers of input variables usually suffer from the curse of dimensionality as well as the risk of overfitting. Using only those features that are relevant for protein subcellular localization might improve the prediction performance and might also provide us with some biologically useful knowledge. In this paper, we present a feature ranking based feature subset selection approach for subcellular localization prediction of proteins in the context of support vector machines (SVMs). Experimental results show that this method improves the prediction performance with selected subsets of features. It is anticipated that the proposed method will be a powerful tool for large-scale annotation of biological data.