A Two-Layer SVM Ensemble-Classifier to Predict Interface Residue Pairs of Protein Trimers

Study of interface residue pairs is important for understanding the interactions between monomers inside a trimer protein-protein complex. We developed a two-layer support vector machine (SVM) ensemble-classifier that considers physicochemical and geometric properties of amino acids and the influence of surrounding amino acids. Different descriptors and different combinations may give different prediction results. We propose feature combination engineering based on correlation coefficients and F-values. The accuracy of our method is 65.38% in independent test set, indicating biological significance. Our predictions are consistent with the experimental results. It shows the effectiveness and reliability of our method to predict interface residue pairs of protein trimers.