ABLE: Attention based learning for enzyme classification

Classifying proteins into their respective enzyme class is an interesting question for researchers for a variety of reasons. The open source Protein Data Bank (PDB) contains more than 1,60,000 structures, with more being added everyday. This paper proposes an attention-based bidirectional-LSTM model (ABLE) trained on over sampled data generated by SMOTE to analyse and classify a protein into one of the six enzyme classes or a negative class using only the primary structure of the protein described as a string by the FASTA sequence as an input. We achieve the highest F1-score of 0.834 using our proposed model on a dataset of proteins from the PDB. We baseline our model against eighteen other machine learning and deep learning networks, including CNN, LSTM, Bi-LSTM, GRU, and the state-of-the-art DeepEC model. We conduct experiments with two different oversampling techniques, SMOTE and ADASYN. To corroborate the obtained results, we perform extensive experimentation and statistical testing.