computational prediction of conformational b-cell epitopes from antigen primary structures by ensemble learning计算预测的构象b细胞抗原表位抗原主要结构通过整体学习.pdfVIP

Computational Prediction of Conformational B-Cell Epitopes from Antigen Primary Structures by Ensemble Learning 1 2 1 1 1,3 1 Wen Zhang *, Yanqing Niu , Yi Xiong , Meng Zhao , Rongwei Yu , Juan Liu 1 School of Computer, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, 2 School of Mathematics and Statistics, South-Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan, China, 3 Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trust Computing, Ministry of Education, Wuhan, China Abstract Motivation: The conformational B-cell epitopes are the specific sites on the antigens that have immune functions. The identification of conformational B-cell epitopes is of great importance to immunologists for facilitating the design of peptide-based vaccines. As an attempt to narrow the search for experimental validation, various computational models have been developed for the epitope prediction by using antigen structures. However, the application of these models is undermined by the limited number of available antigen structures. In contrast to the most of available structure-based methods, we here attempt to accurately predict conformational B-cell epitopes from antigen sequences. Methods: In this paper, we explore various sequence-derived features, which have been observed to be associated with the location of epitopes or ever used in the similar tasks. These features are evaluated and ranked by their discriminative performance on the benchmark datasets. From the perspective of information science, the combination of various features can usually lead to better results than the individual features. In order to build the robust model, we adopt the ensemble learning approach to incorporate vario