DeepGOZero: Improving protein function prediction from sequence and zero-shot learning based on ontology axioms

Motivation Protein functions are often described using the Gene Ontology (GO) which is an ontology consisting of over 50,000 classes and a large set of formal axioms. Predicting the functions of proteins is one of the key challenges in computational biology and a variety of machine learning methods have been developed for this purpose. However, these methods usually require significant amount of training data and cannot make predictions for GO classes which have only few or no experimental annotations. Results We developed DeepGOZero, a machine learning model which improves predictions for functions with no or only a small number of annotations. To achieve this goal, we rely on a model-theoretic approach for learning ontology embeddings and combine it with neural networks for protein function prediction. DeepGOZero can exploit formal axioms in the GO to make zero-shot predictions, i.e., predict protein functions even if not a single protein in the training phase was associated with that function. Furthermore, the zero-shot prediction method employed by DeepGOZero is generic and can be applied whenever associations with ontology classes need to be predicted. Availability http://github.com/bio-ontology-research-group/deepgozero Contact [email protected]