Protein remote homology detection using dissimilarity-based multiple instance learning

Abstract

A challenging Pattern Recognition problem in Bioinformatics concerns the detection of a functional relation between two proteins even when they show very low sequence similarity – this is the so-called Protein Remote Homology Detection (PRHD) problem. In this paper we propose a novel approach to PRHD, which casts the problem into a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework, which seems very suitable for this context. Experiments on a standard benchmark show very competitive performances, also in comparison with alternative discriminative methods.