Machine Learning-Based Ensemble Model for Zika Virus T-Cell Epitope Prediction

Zika virus (ZIKV), the causative agent of Zika fever in humans, is an RNA virus that belongs to the genus Flavivirus. Currently, there is no approved vaccine for clinical use to combat the ZIKV infection and contain the epidemic. Epitope-based peptide vaccines have a large untapped potential for boosting vaccination safety, cross-reactivity, and immunogenicity. Though many attempts have been made to develop vaccines for ZIKV, none of these have proved to be successful. Epitope-based peptide vaccines can act as powerful alternatives to conventional vaccines due to their low production cost, less reactogenic, and allergenic responses. For designing an effective and viable epitope-based peptide vaccine against this deadly virus, it is essential to select the antigenic T-cell epitopes since epitope-based vaccines are considered safe. The in silico machine-learning-based approach for ZIKV T-cell epitope prediction would save a lot of physical experimental time and efforts for speedy vaccine development compared to in vivo approaches. We hereby have trained a machine-learning-based computational model to predict novel ZIKV T-cell epitopes by employing physicochemical properties of amino acids. The proposed ensemble model based on a voting mechanism works by blending the predictions for each class (epitope or nonepitope) from each base classifier. Predictions obtained for each class by the individual classifier are summed up, and the class with the majority vote is predicted upon. An odd number of classifiers have been used to avoid the occurrence of ties in the voting. Experimentally determined ZIKV peptide sequences data set was collected from Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB) repository. The data set consists of 3,519 sequences, of which 1,762 are epitopes and 1,757 are nonepitopes. The length of sequences ranges from 6 to 30 meter. For each sequence, we extracted 13 physicochemical features. The proposed ensemble model achieved sensitivity, specificity, Gini coefficient, AUC, precision, F-score, and accuracy of 0.976, 0.959, 0.993, 0.994, 0.989, 0.985, and 97.13%, respectively. To check the consistency of the model, we carried out five-fold cross-validation and an average accuracy of 96.072% is reported. Finally, a comparative analysis of the proposed model with existing methods has been carried out using a separate validation data set, suggesting the proposed ensemble model as a better model. The proposed ensemble model will help predict novel ZIKV vaccine candidates to save lives globally and prevent future epidemic-scale outbreaks.