SME-MFP: A novel spatiotemporal neural network with multiangle initialization embedding toward multifunctional...

As a promising alternative to conventional antibiotic drugs in the biomedical field, functional peptide has been widely used in disease treatment owing to its low toxicity, high absorption rate, and biological activity. Recently, several machine learning methods have been developed for functional peptide prediction. However, the main research heavily relies on statistical features and few consider multifunctional peptide identification. So, we propose SME-MFP, a novel predictor in the imbalanced multi-label functional peptide datasets. First, we employ physicochemical and evolutionary information to represent the peptide sequence's initialization features from multiple perspectives. Second, the features are fused and then put into spatial feature extractors, where the residual connection and multiscale convolutional neural network extract more discriminative features of different lengths' peptide sequences. Besides, we also design AFT-based temporal feature extractors to fully capture the global interactions of the sequences. Finally, devising a new loss to replace the traditional cross entropy loss to settle the class imbalance problems. The results show that our framework not only enhances the model's ability to capture sequence features effectively, but also accuracy improves by 3.89% over existing methods on public peptide datasets.