Identification of Essential Proteins using a Novel Multi-objective Optimization Method

Using graph theory to identify essential proteins is a hot topic at present. These methods are called network-based methods. However, the generalization ability of most network-based methods is not satisfactory. Hence, in this paper, we consider the identification of essential proteins as a multi-objective optimization problem and use a novel multi-objective optimization method to solve it. The optimization result is a set of Pareto solutions. Every solution in this set is a vector which has a certain number of essential protein candidates and is considered as an independent predictor or voter. We use a voting strategy to assemble the results of these predictors. To validate our method, we apply it on the protein-protein interactions (PPI) datasets of two species (Yeast and Escherichia coli). The experiment results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of sensitive, specificity, F-measure, accuracy, and generalization ability.