Accurate predictions of protein structure properties, for example, secondary structure and solvent accessibility, are essential in analyzing the structure and function of a protein. Position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM) features are widely used in the structure property prediction. However, some proteins may have low-quality PSSM features due to insufficient homologous sequences, leading to limited prediction accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose an enhancing scheme for PSSM features. We introduce the "Bagging MSA" (multiple sequence alignment) method to calculate PSSM features used to train our model, adopt a convolutional network to capture local context features and bidirectional long short-term memory for long-term dependencies, and integrate them under an unsupervised framework. Structure property prediction models are then built upon such enhanced PSSM features for more accurate predictions. Moreover, we develop two frameworks to evaluate the effectiveness of the enhanced PSSM features, which also bring proposed method into real-world scenarios. Empirical evaluation of CB513, CASP11, and CASP12 data sets indicates that our unsupervised enhancing scheme indeed generates more informative PSSM features for structure property prediction.
Keywords: deep learning; enhancing PSSM; protein; protein solvent accessibility; secondary structure; unsupervised learning.