Motivation
Despite advances in the gene annotation process, the functions of a large portion of the gene products remain insufficiently characterized. In addition, the “in silico” prediction of novel Gene Ontology (GO) annotations for partially characterized gene functions or processes is highly dependent on reverse genetic or function genomics approaches.
Results
We propose a novel approach, Information Theory-based Semantic Similarity (ITSS), to automatically predict molecular functions of genes based on Gene Ontology annotations. We have demonstrated using a 10-fold cross-validation that the ITSS algorithm obtains prediction accuracies (Precision 97%, Recall 77%) comparable to other machine learning algorithms when applied to similarly dense annotated portions of the GO datasets. In addition, such method can generate highly accurate predictions in sparsely annotated portions of GO, in which previous algorithm failed to do so. As a result, our technique generates an order of magnitude more gene function predictions than previous methods. Further, this paper presents the first historical rollback validation for the predicted GO annotations, which may represent more realistic conditions for an evaluation than generally used cross-validations type of evaluations. By manually assessing a random sample of 100 predictions conducted in a historical roll-back evaluation, we estimate that a minimum precision of 51% (95% confidence interval: 43%–58%) can be achieved for the human GO Annotation file dated 2003.
Availability
The program is available on request. The 97,732 positive predictions of novel gene annotations from the 2005 GO Annotation dataset are available at http://phenos.bsd.uchicago.edu/mphenogo/prediction_result_2005.txt.
