Protein essentiality is fundamental to comprehend the function and evolution of genes. The prediction of protein essentiality is pivotal in identifying disease genes and potential drug targets. Since the experimental methods need many investments in time and funds, it is of great value to predict protein essentiality with high accuracy using computational methods. In this study, we present a novel feature selection named Elite Search mechanism-based Flower Pollination Algorithm (ESFPA) to determine protein essentiality. Unlike other protein essentiality prediction methods, ESFPA uses an improved swarm intelligence⁻based algorithm for feature selection and selects optimal features for protein essentiality prediction. The first step is to collect numerous features with the highly predictive characteristics of essentiality. The second step is to develop a feature selection strategy based on a swarm intelligence algorithm to obtain the optimal feature subset. Furthermore, an elite search mechanism is adopted to further improve the quality of feature subset. Subsequently a hybrid classifier is applied to evaluate the essentiality for each protein. Finally, the experimental results show that our method is competitive to some well-known feature selection methods. The proposed method aims to provide a new perspective for protein essentiality determination.
Keywords: essential protein; feature selection; flower pollination algorithm; machine learning; protein-protein interaction (PPI) network.