An MLP-based feature subset selection for HIV-1 protease cleavage site analysis

Objective ent years, several machine learning approaches have been applied to modeling the specificity of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) protease cleavage domain. However, the high dimensional domain dataset contains a small number of samples, which could misguide classification modeling and its interpretation. Appropriate feature selection can alleviate the problem by eliminating irrelevant and redundant features, and thus improve prediction performance. s roduce a new feature subset selection method, FS-MLP, that selects relevant features using multi-layered perceptron (MLP) learning. The method includes MLP learning with a training dataset and then feature subset selection using decompositional approach to analyze the trained MLP. Our method is able to select a subset of relevant features in high dimensional, multi-variate and non-linear domains. s five artificial datasets that represent four data types, we verified the FS-MLP performance with seven other feature selection methods. Experimental results showed that the FS-MLP is superior at high dimensional, multi-variate and non-linear domains. In experiments with HIV-1 protease cleavage dataset, the FS-MLP selected a set of 14 highly relevant features among 160 original features. On a validation set of 131 test instances, classifiers that used the 14 features showed about 95% accuracy which outperformed other seven methods in terms of accuracy and the number of features. sions perimental results indicate that the FS-MLP is effective in analyzing multi-variate, non-linear and high dimensional datasets such as HIV-1 protease cleavage dataset. The 14 relevant features which were selected by the FS-MLP provide us with useful insights into the HIV-1 cleavage site domain as well. The FS-MLP is a useful method for computational sequence analysis in general.