HIT-EC: Trustworthy prediction of enzyme commission numbers using a hierarchical interpretable transformer

Accurate and trustworthy prediction of Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers is critical for understanding enzyme functions and their roles in biological processes. Despite the success of recently proposed deep learning-based models, there remain limitations, such as low performance in underrepresented EC numbers, lack of learning strategy with incomplete annotations, and limited interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hierarchical interpretable transformer model, HIT-EC, for trustworthy EC number prediction. HIT-EC employs a four-level transformer architecture that aligns with the hierarchical structure of EC numbers, and leverages both local and global dependencies within protein sequences for this multi-label classification task. We also propose a novel learning strategy to handle incomplete EC numbers. HIT-EC, as an evidential deep learning model, produces trustworthy predictions by providing domain-specific evidence through a biologically meaningful interpretation scheme. The predictive performance of HIT-EC was assessed by multiple experiments: a cross-validation with a large dataset, a validation with external data, and a species-based performance evaluation. HIT-EC showed statistically significant improvement in predictive performance when compared to the current state-of-the-art benchmark models. HIT-ECs robust interpretability was further validated by identifying well-known conserved motifs and functional regions in the CYP106A2 enzyme family. HIT-EC would be a robust, interpretable, and reliable solution for EC number prediction, with significant implications for enzymology, drug discovery, and metabolic engineering. The open-source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/datax-lab/HIT-EC.