A novel ant colony optimization based single path hierarchical classification algorithm for predicting gene ontology

There exist numerous state of the art classification algorithms that are designed to handle the data with nominal or binary class labels. Unfortunately, less attention is given to the genre of classification problems where the classes are organized as a structured hierarchy; such as protein function prediction (target area in this work), test scores, gene ontology, web page categorization, text categorization etc. The structured hierarchy is usually represented as a tree or a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where there exist IS-A relationship among the class labels. Class labels at upper level of the hierarchy are more abstract and easy to predict whereas class labels at deeper level are most specific and challenging for correct prediction. It is helpful to consider this class hierarchy for designing a hypothesis that can handle the tradeoff between prediction accuracy and prediction specificity. In this paper, a novel ant colony optimization (ACO) based single path hierarchical classification algorithm is proposed that incorporates the given class hierarchy during its learning phase. The algorithm produces IF–THEN ordered rule list and thus offer comprehensible classification model. Detailed discussion on the architecture and design of the proposed technique is provided which is followed by the empirical evaluation on six ion-channels data sets (related to protein function prediction) and two publicly available data sets. The performance of the algorithm is encouraging as compared to the existing methods based on the statistically significant Student's t-test (keeping in view, prediction accuracy and specificity) and thus confirm the promising ability of the proposed technique for hierarchical classification task.