Sumaiya Iqbal

Solving the multi-objective Vehicle Routing Problem with Soft Time Windows with the help of bees

Abstract This paper presents a new model and solution for the multi-objective Vehicle Routing Problem with Soft Time Windows ( VRPSTW ) using a hybrid metaheuristic technique. The proposed methodology is developed on the basics of a new swarm based Artificial Bee Colony ( ABC ) algorithm combined with two-step constrained local search for neighborhood selection. VRPSTW involves computing the routes of a set of vehicles with fixed capacity from a central depot to a set of geographically dispersed customers with known demands and predefined time windows. Here, the time window constraints are relaxed into “soft”, that is penalty terms are added to the solution cost whenever a vehicle serves a customer outside of his time window. The solution of routing problems with soft time windows has valuable practical applications. This paper uses a direct interpretation of the VRPSTW as a multi-objective optimization problem where the total traveling distance, number of window violations and number of required vehicles are minimized while capacity and time window constraints are met. Our work aims at using ABC inspired foraging behavior of honey bees which balances exploration and exploitation to avoid local optima and reach the global optima. The algorithm is applied to solve the well known benchmark Solomon׳s problem instances. Experimental results show that our suggested approach is quite effective, as it provides solutions that are competitive with the best known results in the literature. Finally, we present an analysis of our proposed algorithm in terms of computational time.

Improved prediction of accessible surface area results in efficient energy function application

An accurate prediction of real value accessible surface area (ASA) from protein sequence alone has wide application in the field of bioinformatics and computational biology. ASA has been helpful in understanding the 3-dimensional structure and function of a protein, acting as high impact feature in secondary structure prediction, disorder prediction, binding region identification and fold recognition applications. To enhance and support broad applications of ASA, we have made an attempt to improve the prediction accuracy of absolute accessible surface area by developing a new predictor paradigm, namely REGAd(3)p, for real value prediction through classical Exact Regression with Regularization and polynomial kernel of degree 3 which was further optimized using Genetic Algorithm. ASA assisting effective energy function, motivated us to enhance the accuracy of predicted ASA for better energy function application. Our ASA prediction paradigm was trained and tested using a new benchmark dataset, proposed in this work, consisting of 1001 and 298 protein chains, respectively. We achieved maximum Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) of 0.76 and 1.45% improved PCC when compared with existing top performing predictor, SPINE-X, in ASA prediction on independent test set. Furthermore, we modeled the error between actual and predicted ASA in terms of energy and combined this energy linearly with the energy function 3DIGARS which resulted in an effective energy function, namely 3DIGARS2.0, outperforming all the state-of-the-art energy functions. Based on Rosetta and Tasser decoy-sets 3DIGARS2.0 resulted 80.78%, 73.77%, 141.24%, 16.52%, and 32.32% improvement over DFIRE, RWplus, dDFIRE, GOAP and 3DIGARS respectively.

A balanced secondary structure predictor

Secondary structure (SS) refers to the local spatial organization of a polypeptide backbone atoms of a protein. Accurate prediction of SS can provide crucial features to form the next higher level of 3D structure of a protein accurately. SS has three different major components, helix (H), beta (E) and coil (C). Most of the SS predictors express imbalanced accuracies by claiming higher prediction performances in predicting H and C, and on the contrary having low accuracy in E predictions. E component being in low count, a predictor may show very good overall performance by over-predicting H and C and under predicting E, which can make such predictors biologically inapplicable. In this work we are motivated to develop a balanced SS predictor by incorporating 33 physicochemical properties into 15-tuble peptides via Chou׳s general PseAAC, which allowed obtaining higher accuracies in predicting all three SS components. Our approach uses three different support vector machines for binary classification of the major classes and then form optimized multiclass predictor using genetic algorithm (GA). The trained three binary SVMs are E versus non-E (i.e., E/¬E), C/¬C and H/¬H. This GA based optimized and combined three class predictor, called cSVM, is further combined with SPINE X to form the proposed final balanced predictor, called MetaSSPred. This novel paradigm assists us in optimizing the precision and recall. We prepared two independent test datasets (CB471 and N295) to compare the performance of our predictors with SPINE X. MetaSSPred significantly increases beta accuracy (QE) for both the datasets. QE score of MetaSSPred on CB471 and N295 were 71.7% and 74.4% respectively. These scores are 20.9% and 19.0% improvement over the QE scores given by SPINE X alone on CB471 and N295 datasets respectively. Standard deviations of the accuracies across three SS classes of MetaSSPred on CB471 and N295 datasets were 4.2% and 2.3% respectively. On the other hand, for SPINE X, these values are 12.9% and 10.9% respectively. These findings suggest that the proposed MetaSSPred is a well-balanced SS predictor compared to the state-of-the-art SPINE X predictor.

Vehicular communication: protocol design, testbed implementation and performance analysis

Vehicular Communication Networks and Systems (VCNS) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are one of the most attractive and challenging topics in recent days since a well efficient protocol for vehicular communication can facilitate the reduction of traffic congestion and can provide us with many more promising applications. In this paper, we propose a protocol for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. As one of the challenging parts of this paper, we present an experimental testbed in which two major applications of V2I & V2V communication (i.e. traffic congestion detection and emergency warning) is implemented. Based on careful analysis, we also calculate some key system parameters which reflect the efficiency of the protocol in different applications.

Discriminate protein decoys from native by using a scoring function based on ubiquitous Phi and Psi angles computed for all atom

The success of solving the protein folding and structure prediction problems in molecular and structural biology relies on an accurate energy function. With the rapid advancement in the computational biology and bioinformatics fields, there is a growing need of solving unknown fold and structure faster and thus an accurate energy function is indispensable. To address this need, we develop a new potential function, namely 3DIGARS3.0, which is a linearly weighted combination of 3DIGARS, mined accessible surface area (ASA) and ubiquitously computed Phi (uPhi) and Psi (uPsi) energies - optimized by a Genetic Algorithm (GA). We use a dataset of 4332 protein-structures to generate uPhi and uPsi based score libraries to be used within the core 3DIGARS method. The optimized weight of each component is obtained by applying Genetic Algorithm based optimization on three challenging decoy sets. The improved 3DIGARS3.0 outperformed state-of-the-art methods significantly based on a set of independent test datasets.

Guided macro-mutation in a graded energy based genetic algorithm for protein structure prediction

Protein structure prediction is considered as one of the most challenging and computationally intractable combinatorial problem. Thus, the efficient modeling of convoluted search space, the clever use of energy functions, and more importantly, the use of effective sampling algorithms become crucial to address this problem. For protein structure modeling, an off-lattice model provides limited scopes to exercise and evaluate the algorithmic developments due to its astronomically large set of data-points. In contrast, an on-lattice model widens the scopes and permits studying the relatively larger proteins because of its finite set of data-points. In this work, we took the full advantage of an on-lattice model by using a face-centered-cube lattice that has the highest packing density with the maximum degree of freedom. We proposed a graded energy-strategically mixes the Miyazawa-Jernigan (MJ) energy with the hydrophobic-polar (HP) energy-based genetic algorithm (GA) for conformational search. In our application, we introduced a 2 × 2 HP energy guided macro-mutation operator within the GA to explore the best possible local changes exhaustively. Conversely, the 20 × 20 MJ energy model-the ultimate objective function of our GA that needs to be minimized-considers the impacts amongst the 20 different amino acids and allow searching the globally acceptable conformations. On a set of benchmark proteins, our proposed approach outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the free energy levels and the root-mean-square deviations.

DisPredict: A Predictor of Disordered Protein Using Optimized RBF Kernel

Intrinsically disordered proteins or, regions perform important biological functions through their dynamic conformations during binding. Thus accurate identification of these disordered regions have significant implications in proper annotation of function, induced fold prediction and drug design to combat critical diseases. We introduce DisPredict, a disorder predictor that employs a single support vector machine with RBF kernel and novel features for reliable characterization of protein structure. DisPredict yields effective performance. In addition to 10-fold cross validation, training and testing of DisPredict was conducted with independent test datasets. The results were consistent with both the training and test error minimal. The use of multiple data sources, makes the predictor generic. The datasets used in developing the model include disordered regions of various length which are categorized as short and long having different compositions, different types of disorder, ranging from fully to partially disordered regions as well as completely ordered regions. Through comparison with other state of the art approaches and case studies, DisPredict is found to be a useful tool with competitive performance. DisPredict is available at https://github.com/tamjidul/DisPredict_v1.0.

Estimation of Position Specific Energy as a Feature of Protein Residues from Sequence Alone for Structural Classification.

A set of features computed from the primary amino acid sequence of proteins, is crucial in the process of inducing a machine learning model that is capable of accurately predicting three-dimensional protein structures. Solutions for existing protein structure prediction problems are in need of features that can capture the complexity of molecular level interactions. With a view to this, we propose a novel approach to estimate position specific estimated energy (PSEE) of a residue using contact energy and predicted relative solvent accessibility (RSA). Furthermore, we demonstrate PSEE can be reasonably estimated based on sequence information alone. PSEE is useful in identifying the structured as well as unstructured or, intrinsically disordered region of a protein by computing favorable and unfavorable energy respectively, characterized by appropriate threshold. The most intriguing finding, verified empirically, is the indication that the PSEE feature can effectively classify disorder versus ordered residues and can segregate different secondary structure type residues by computing the constituent energies. PSEE values for each amino acid strongly correlate with the hydrophobicity value of the corresponding amino acid. Further, PSEE can be used to detect the existence of critical binding regions that essentially undergo disorder-to-order transitions to perform crucial biological functions. Towards an application of disorder prediction using the PSEE feature, we have rigorously tested and found that a support vector machine model informed by a set of features including PSEE consistently outperforms a model with an identical set of features with PSEE removed. In addition, the new disorder predictor, DisPredict2, shows competitive performance in predicting protein disorder when compared with six existing disordered protein predictors.

PBRpredict-Suite: a suite of models to predict peptide-recognition domain residues from protein sequence

Motivation Machine learning plays a substantial role in bioscience owing to the explosive growth in sequence data and the challenging application of computational methods. Peptide-recognition domains (PRDs) are critical as they promote coupled-binding with short peptide-motifs of functional importance through transient interactions. It is challenging to build a reliable predictor of peptide-binding residue in proteins with diverse types of PRDs from protein sequence alone. On the other hand, it is vital to cope up with the sequencing speed and to broaden the scope of study. Results In this paper, we propose a machine-learning-based tool, named PBRpredict, to predict residues in peptide-binding domains from protein sequence alone. To develop a generic predictor, we train the models on peptide-binding residues of diverse types of domains. As inputs to the models, we use a high-dimensional feature set of chemical, structural and evolutionary information extracted from protein sequence. We carefully investigate six different state-of-the-art classification algorithms for this application. Finally, we use the stacked generalization approach to non-linearly combine a set of complementary base-level learners using a meta-level learner which outperformed the winner-takes-all approach. The proposed predictor is found competitive based on statistical evaluation. Availability and implementation PBRpredict-Suite software: http://cs.uno.edu/~tamjid/Software/PBRpredict/pbrpredict-suite.zip. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

RBSURFpred: Modeling protein accessible surface area in real and binary space using regularized and optimized regression

Accessible surface area (ASA) of a protein residue is an effective feature for protein structure prediction, binding region identification, fold recognition problems etc. Improving the prediction of ASA by the application of effective feature variables is a challenging but explorable task to consider, specially in the field of machine learning. Among the existing predictors of ASA, REGAd3p is a highly accurate ASA predictor which is based on regularized exact regression with polynomial kernel of degree 3. In this work, we present a new predictor RBSURFpred, which extends REGAd3p on several dimensions by incorporating 58 physicochemical, evolutionary and structural properties into 9-tuple peptides via Chous general PseAAC, which allowed us to obtain higher accuracies in predicting both real-valued and binary ASA. We have compared RBSURFpred for both real and binary space predictions with state-of-the-art predictors, such as REGAd3p and SPIDER2. We also have carried out a rigorous analysis of the performance of RBSURFpred in terms of different amino acids and their properties, and also with biologically relevant case-studies. The performance of RBSURFpred establishes itself as a useful tool for the community.