BPFun: a deep learning framework for bioactive peptide function prediction using multi-label strategy by transformer-driven and sequence rich intrinsic information

Bioactive peptides are beneficial or have physiological effects on the life activities of biological organisms. The functions of bioactive peptides are diverse, usually with one or more, so accurately detecting the multiple functions of multi-functional peptides is extremely important. Traditional experimental identification methods are time-consuming, laborious and costly. To overcome these problems, we adopt a computational biology approach and propose a new model BPFun based on deep learning, which can predict seven functions including anticancer, antibacterial, antihypertensive and so on. In BPFun, we obtained the features of bioactive peptides from different aspects, including biological and physicochemical features. Meanwhile, adopting data augmentation to solve the problem of data imbalance. We combine convolutional networks of different scales and Bi-LSTM layers to obtain high-level feature vectors of different features. Finally, the prediction performance is improved by combining these fused features and combining the self-attention mechanism and the Bi-LSTM layer. Our experiments show that BPFun based on five types of sequence features significantly improves the prediction performance of bioactive peptides. Experiments on the test dataset showed that BPFun gets the accuracy and absolute truth value of 0.6577 and 0.6573 on the dataset of seven functional classifications and was superior to other methods. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/291357657/BPFun .