Multi-AMP: detecting the antimicrobial peptides and their activities using the multi-task learning

Recently due to the broad-spectrum and high-efficiency antibacterial activity, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have become the best alternative to antibiotics. With the rapid increase of the antibacterial peptides, many computational methods have been developed to identify the AMPs and their specific antibacterial activities. However, most existing methods regard these two problems as independent sub-problems and ignore the correlation between tasks. In this paper, we propose a method, Multi-AMP, which utilizes multi-task learning and solves two tasks simultaneously: 1) whether a given peptide is AMP, 2) which activities it performs. The two tasks share the parameters at the bottom layers of the model and learn the specific information at the top layers. Experiments indicate that our multi-task model performs better than single-task models and two existing predictors, which can give insights to the drug discovery process.