DeepAIPs-Pred: Predicting Anti-Inflammatory Peptides Using Local Evolutionary Transformation Images and Structural Embedding-Based Optimal Descriptors with Self-Normalized BiTCNs

Abstract

Inflammation is a biological response to harmful stimuli, playing a crucial role in facilitating tissue repair by eradicating pathogenic microorganisms. However, when inflammation becomes chronic, it leads to numerous serious disorders, particularly in autoimmune diseases. Anti-inflammatory peptides (AIPs) have emerged as promising therapeutic agents due to their high specificity, potency, and low toxicity. However, identifying AIPs using traditional in vivo methods is time-consuming and expensive. Recent advancements in computational-based intelligent models for peptides have offered a cost-effective alternative for identifying various inflammatory diseases, owing to their selectivity toward targeted cells with low side effects. In this paper, we propose a novel computational model, namely, DeepAIPs-Pred, for the accurate prediction of AIP sequences. The training samples are represented using LBP-PSSM- and LBP-SMR-based evolutionary image transformation methods. Additionally, to capture contextual semantic features, we employed attention-based ProtBERT-BFD embedding and QLC for structural features. Furthermore, differential evolution (DE)-based weighted feature integration is utilized to produce a multiview feature vector. The SMOTE-Tomek Links are introduced to address the class imbalance problem, and a two-layer feature selection technique is proposed to reduce and select the optimal features. Finally, the novel self-normalized bidirectional temporal convolutional networks (SnBiTCN) are trained using optimal features, achieving a significant predictive accuracy of 94.92% and an AUC of 0.97. The generalization of our proposed model is validated using two independent datasets, demonstrating higher performance with the improvement of ∼2 and ∼10% of accuracies than the existing state-of-the-art model using Ind-I and Ind-II, respectively. The efficacy and reliability of DeepAIPs-Pred highlight its potential as a valuable and promising tool for drug development and research academia.