抄録
In this paper, we apply Mamitsuka and Yamanishi's method (for short, the MY method) to predicting protein α-helix region for a-domain-type (α/α) proteins. The MY method provides a stochastic rule, which assigns, to any region in an amino acid sequence, a probability that it is α-helix. Further, on the basis of the minimum description length (MDL) principle, the MY method optimally categorizes 20 types of amino acids using their numberical attiributes (e. g. molecular weight, hydrophobicity, etc.) into less than 20 groups. Our experimental results show that, by using a variety of proteins to obtain examples of a-helix, the MY method achieves the average prediction rates of more than 80% and 70% for training and test examples respectively, and these results are significantly better than those of conventional methods, i. e. Chou and Fasman, Gander et. al., Qian and Sejnowski etc.
