AUTHOR=Liu Mingyou , Wu Tao , Li Xue , Zhu Yingxue , Chen Sen , Huang Jian , Zhou Fengfeng , Liu Hongmei TITLE=ACPPfel: Explainable deep ensemble learning for anticancer peptides prediction based on feature optimization JOURNAL=Frontiers in Genetics VOLUME=15 YEAR=2024 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2024.1352504 DOI=10.3389/fgene.2024.1352504 ISSN=1664-8021 ABSTRACT=

Background: Cancer is a significant global health problem that continues to cause a high number of deaths worldwide. Traditional cancer treatments often come with risks that can compromise the functionality of vital organs. As a potential alternative to these conventional therapies, Anticancer peptides (ACPs) have garnered attention for their small size, high specificity, and reduced toxicity, making them as a promising option for cancer treatments.

Methods: However, the process of identifying effective ACPs through wet-lab screening experiments is time-consuming and requires a lot of labor. To overcome this challenge, a deep ensemble learning method is constructed to predict anticancer peptides (ACPs) in this study. To evaluate the reliability of the framework, four different datasets are used in this study for training and testing. During the training process of the model, integration of feature selection methods, feature dimensionality reduction measures, and optimization of the deep ensemble model are carried out. Finally, we explored the interpretability of features that affected the final prediction results and built a web server platform to facilitate anticancer peptides prediction, which can be used by all researchers for further studies. This web server can be accessed at http://lmylab.online:5001/.

Results: The result of this study achieves an accuracy rate of 98.53% and an AUC (Area under Curve) value of 0.9972 on the ACPfel dataset, it has improvements on other datasets as well.