Amino Acid Composition and Charge Based Prediction of Antisepsis Peptides by Random Forest Machine Learning Algorithm

Sepsis is a severe infectious disease with high mortality, and it occurs when chemicals released in the bloodstream to fight an infection trigger inflammation throughout the body and it can cause a cascade of changes that damage multiple organ systems, leading them to fail, even resulting in death. In order to reduce the possibility of sepsis or infection antiseptics are used and process is known as antisepsis. Antiseptic peptides (ASPs) show properties similar to antigram-negative peptides, antigram-positive peptides and many more. Machine learning algorithms are useful in screening and identification of therapeutic peptides and thus provide initial filters or built confidence before using time consuming and laborious experimental approaches. In this study, various machine learning algorithms like Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) and Logistic Regression (LR) were evaluated for prediction of ASPs. Moreover, the characteristics physicochemical features of ASPs were also explored to use them in machine learning. Both manual and automatic feature selection methodology was employed to achieve best performance of machine learning algorithms. A 5-fold cross validation and independent data set validation proved RF as the best model for prediction of ASPs. Our RF model showed an accuracy of 97%, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.93, which are indication of a robust and good model. To our knowledge this is the first attempt to build a machine learning classifier for prediction of ASPs.