Evolutionary Optimization of Kernel Weights Improves Protein Complex Comembership Prediction

In recent years, more and more high-throughput data sources useful for protein complex prediction have become available (e.g., gene sequence, mRNA expression, and interactions). The integration of these different data sources can be challenging. Recently, it has been recognized that kernel-based classifiers are well suited for this task. However, the different kernels (data sources) are often combined using equal weights. Although several methods have been developed to optimize kernel weights, no large-scale example of an improvement in classifier performance has been shown yet. In this work, we employ an evolutionary algorithm to determine weights for a larger set of kernels by optimizing a criterion based on the area under the ROC curve. We show that setting the right kernel weights can indeed improve performance. We compare this to the existing kernel weight optimization methods (i.e., (regularized) optimization of the SVM criterion or aligning the kernel with an ideal kernel) and find that these do not result in a significant performance improvement and can even cause a decrease in performance. Results also show that an expert approach of assigning high weights to features with high individual performance is not necessarily the best strategy.