A Binary Classifier for the Prediction of EC Numbers of Enzymes

Background: Identification of Enzyme Commission (EC) number of enzymes is quite important for understanding the metabolic processes that produce enough energy to sustain life. Previous studies mainly focused on predicting six main functional classes or sub-functional classes, i.e., the first two digits of the EC number. Objective: In this study, a binary classifier was proposed to identify the full EC number (four digits) of enzymes. Methods: Enzymes and their known EC numbers were paired as positive samples and negative samples were randomly produced that were as many as positive samples. The associations between any two samples were evaluated by integrating the linkages between enzymes and EC numbers. The classic machining learning algorithm, Support Vector Machine (SVM), was adopted as the prediction engine. Results: The five-fold cross-validation test on five datasets indicated that the overall accuracy, Matthews correlation coefficient and F1-measure were about 0.786, 0.576 and 0.771, respectively, suggesting the utility of the proposed classifier. In addition, the effectiveness of the classifier was elaborated by comparing it with other classifiers that were based on other classic machine learning algorithms. Conclusion: The proposed classifier was quite effective for prediction of EC number of enzymes and was specially designed for dealing with the problem addressed in this study by testing it on five datasets containing randomly produced samples.