Feature selection on a dataset of protein families: from exploratory data analysis to statistical variable importance

2016

Proteins are characterized by several typologies of features (structural, geometrical, energy). Most of these features are expected to be similar within a protein family. We are interested to detect which features can identify proteins that belong to a family, as well as to define the boundaries among families. Some features are redundant: they could generate noise in identifying which variables are essential as a fingerprint and, consequently, if they are related or not to a function of a protein family. We defined an original approach to analyze protein features for defining their relationships and peculiarities within protein families. A multistep approach has been mainly performed in R …