iAnOxPep: A Machine Learning Model for the Identification of Anti-Oxidative Peptides Using Ensemble Learning

Due to their safety, high activity, and plentiful sources, antioxidant peptides, particularly those produced from food, are thought to be prospective competitors to synthetic antioxidants in the fight against free radical-mediated illnesses. The lengthy and laborious trial-and-error method for identifying antioxidative peptides (AOP) has raised interest in creating computational-based methods. There exist two state-of-the-art AOP predictors; however, the restriction on peptide sequence length makes them inviable. By overcoming the aforementioned problem, a novel predictor might be useful in the context of AOP prediction. The method has been trained, tested, and evaluated on two datasets: a balanced one and an unbalanced one. We used seven different descriptors and five machine-learning (ML) classifiers to construct 35 baseline models. Five ML classifiers were further trained to create five meta-models using the combined output of 35 baseline models. Finally, these five meta-models were aggregated together through ensemble learning to create a robust predictive model named iAnOxPep. On both datasets, our proposed model demonstrated good prediction performance when compared to baseline models and meta-models, demonstrating the superiority of our approach in the identification of AOPs. For the purpose of screening and identifying possible AOPs, we anticipate that the iAnOxPep method will be an invaluable tool.