DeepMFFGO: A Protein Function Prediction Method for Large-Scale Multifeature Fusion

Protein functional studies are crucial in the fields of drug target discovery and drug design. However, the existing methods have significant bottlenecks in utilizing multisource data fusion and Gene Ontology (GO) hierarchy. To this end, this study innovatively proposes the DeepMFFGO model designed for protein function prediction under large-scale multifeature fusion. A fine-tuning strategy using intermediate-level feature selection is proposed to reduce redundancy in protein sequences and mitigate distortion of the top-level features. A hierarchical progressive fusion structure is designed to explore feature connections, optimize complementarity through dynamic weight allocation, and reduce redundant interference. On the CAFA3 data set, the F_max values of the DeepMFFGO model on the MF, BP, and CC ontologies reach 0.702, 0.599, and 0.704, respectively, which are improved by 4.2%, 2.4%, and 0.07%, respectively, compared with state-of-the-art multisource methods.