Evolutionary decision rules for predicting protein contact maps

Protein structure prediction is currently one of the main open challenges in Bioinformatics. The protein contact map is an useful, and commonly used, represen tation for protein 3D structure and represents binary proximities (contact or non-contact) between each pair of amino acids of a protein. In this work, we propose a multi objective evolutionary approach for contact map prediction based on physico-chemical properties of amino acids. The evolutionary algorithm produces a set of decision rules that identifies contacts between amino acids. The rules obtained by the algorithm impose a set of conditions based on amino acid properties to predict contacts. We present results obtained by our approach on four different protein data sets. A statistical study was also performed to extract valid conclusions from the set of prediction rules generated by our algorithm. Results obtained confirm the validity of our proposal.