PNNL

Abstract

Using biopolymer sequence comparison methods to identify evolutionarily related proteins is one of the most common tasks in bioinformatics. Recently, support vector machines (SVMs) utilizing statistical learning theory have been employed in the problem of remote homology detection and shown to outperform iterative profile methods such as PSI-BLAST. In this study we demonstrate the utilization of a Bayesian alignment score, which accounts for the uncertainty of all possible alignments, in the SVM construction improves sensitivity compared to the traditional dynamic programming implementation.