GCNCPR-ACPs: a novel graph convolution network method for ACPs prediction

Abstract Background Anticancer peptide (ACP) inhibits and kills tumor cells. Research on ACP is of great significance for the development of new drugs, and the prediction of ACPs and non-ACPs is the new hotspot. Results We propose a new machine learning-based method named GCNCPR-ACPs (a Graph Convolutional Neural Network Method based on collapse pooling and residual network to predict the ACPs), which automatically and accurately predicts ACPs using residual graph convolution networks, differentiable graph pooling, and features extracted using peptide sequence information extraction. The GCNCPR-ACPs method can effectively capture different levels of node attributes for amino acid node representation learning, GCNCPR-ACPs uses node2vec and one-hot embedding methods to extract initial amino acid features for ACP prediction. Conclusions Experimental results of ten-fold cross-validation and independent validation based on different metrics showed that GCNCPR-ACPs significantly outperformed state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, the evaluation indicators of Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) and AUC of our predicator were 69.5% and 90%, respectively, which were 4.3% and 2% higher than those of the other predictors, respectively, in ten-fold cross-validation. And in the independent test, the scores of MCC and SP were 69.6% and 93.9%, respectively, which were 37.6% and 5.5% higher than those of the other predictors, respectively. The overall results showed that the GCNCPR-ACPs method proposed in the current paper can effectively predict ACPs.