Genetic programming for predicting protein networks

Abstract

One of the definitely unsolved main problems in molecular biology is the protein-protein functional association prediction problem. Genetic Programming (GP) is applied to this domain. GP evolves an expression, equivalent to a binary classifier, which predicts if a given pair of proteins interacts. We take advantages of GP flexibility, particularly, the possibility of defining new operations. In this paper, the missing values problem benefits from the definition of if-unknown, a new operation which is more appropriate to the domain data semantics. Besides, in order to improve the solution size and the computational time, we use the Tarpeian method which controls the bloat effect of GP. According to the obtained results, we have verified the feasibility of using GP in this domain, and the enhancement in the search efficiency and interpretability of solutions due to the Tarpeian method.