An improved multi-scale convolutional neural network with gated recurrent neural network model for protein secondary structure prediction

Protein structure prediction is one of the main research areas in the field of Bio-informatics. The importance of proteins in drug design attracts researchers for finding the accurate tertiary structure of the protein which is dependent on its secondary structure. In this paper, we focus on improving the accuracy of protein secondary structure prediction. To do so, a Multi-scale convolutional neural network with a Gated recurrent neural network (MCNN-GRNN) is proposed. The novel amino acid encoding method along with layered convolutional neural network and Gated recurrent neural network blocks helps to retrieve local and global relationships between features, which in turn effectively classify the input protein sequence into 3 and 8 states. We have evaluated our algorithm on CullPDB, CB513, PDB25, CASP10, CASP11, CASP12, CASP13, and CASP14 datasets. We have compared our algorithm with different state-of-the-art algorithms like DCNN-SS, DCRNN, MUFOLD-SS, DLBLS_SS, and CGAN-PSSP. The Q3 accuracy of the proposed algorithm is 82–87% and Q8 accuracy is 69–77% on different datasets.