Predicting ligand binding residues using multi-positional correlations and kernel canonical correlation analysis

We present a new computational method for predicting ligand binding sites in protein sequences. The method uses kernelbased canonical correlation analysis and linear regression to identify binding sites in protein sequences as the residues that exhibit strong correlation between the residues´ evolutionary characterization at the sites and the structure based functional classification of the proteins in the context of a functional family. We explore the effect of correlations among multiple positions in the sequences and show that their inclusion enhances the prediction accuracy significantly.