Consensus-Based Prediction of RNA and DNA Binding Residues from Protein Sequences

Computational prediction of RNA- and DNA-binding residues from protein sequences offers a high-throughput and accurate solution to functionally annotate the avalanche of the protein sequence data. Although many predictors exist, the efforts to improve predictive performance with the use of consensus methods are so far limited. We explore and empirically compare a comprehensive set of different designs of consensuses including simple approaches that combine binary predictions and more sophisticated machine learning models. We consider both DNA- and RNA-binding motivated by similarities in these interactions, which should lead to similar conclusions. We observe that the simple consensuses do not provide improved predictive performance when applied to sequences that share low similarity with the datasets used to build their input predictors. However, use of machine learning models, such as linear regression, Support Vector Machine and Naïve Bayes, results in improved predictive performance when compared with the best individual predictors for the prediction of DNA- and RNA-binding residues.