Epitopes Toolkit (EpiT) Yasser EL-Manzalawy http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~yasser March 9, 2009 What is EpiT?

Epitopes Toolkit (EpiT) is a platform for developing epitope prediction tools. An EpiT developer can distribute his predictor as a serialized Java object (model file). This allows other EpiT users to use his predictor on their own machines, rebuild the predictor on other datasets, or combine the predictor with other predictors to obtain a customized hybrid or consensus predictor. Overview of EpiT EpiT has two main components: i. Model builder, an application for building and evaluating epitope predictors and serializing these models in a binary format (model files) ii. Predictor, an application for applying a model to test data (e.g., set of epitopes or protein sequences). Model builder The model builder application is an extension of Weka [1], a well-known machine learning workbench supporting many standard machine learning algorithms. Weka provides tools for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, validation, and visualization. Furthermore, Weka provides a framework for implementing new machine learning methods and data pre-processors. The model builder in EpiT offers the following extensions to Weka: i) a suite of data pre-processors (called filters in Weka) for converting epitope sequences into a vector of numerical features such that Weka supported methods can be applied to the data. The current implementation supports filters for converting epitope sequences into amino acid compositions, dipeptide compositions, amino acid pair propensities [2], compositiontransition-distribution (CTD) [3,4], and nominal attributes. Once epitope sequences have been converted into numeric or nominal features, any suitable Weka learner can be trained and evaluated on that datasets; ii) a
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number of methods that can be directly (without applying any filters) trained and evaluated for qualitative and quantitative epitope predictions. The current implementation of EpiT provides classifiers for propensity scale methods (e.g., Parkers hydropholicity scale [5]), position specific scoring matrix (PSSM) [6], and a method for predicting MHC class II binding affinity using multiple-instance regression [7]. In addition, a meta-classifier for building a consensus predictor combining a group of predictors and a meta-classifier for building epitope predictors from highly unbalanced training datasets by randomly under-sampling instances from the majority class. More information about these extensions is provided in the Epit API documentation.

Predictor The Predictor is a graphical user interface (GUI) for applying a model to a test datasets. Specifically, the user inputs the model file, the test data file, the output file name, the format of the test data (set of epitopes or fasta sequences), the type of the problem (peptide-based or residue-based) [8], and the length of the peptide/window sequence. The output of the predictor is a summary of the input model (model name, model parameters, and the name of the datasets used to build the model) followed by the predictions. The predictions are four tab-separated columns. The first column is the epitope/antigen identifier. The second and third columns are position and the sequence of the predicted peptide/residue sequence. The last column is the predicted scores. Installing and using EpiT EpiT is platform-independent since it is implemented in Java. For Installing EpiT, one needs to download it from the project web site and unzip the compressed file. For running EpiT, you need to add all the jar files included in the lib folder to the CLASSPATH and run the epit.jar file (See RunEpiT.bat as an example). The following command sets the CLASSPATH and runs EpiT:
java Xmx512m -classpath "./epit.jar;./lib/weka.jar;./lib/readseq.jar;./lib/swing-layout1.0.3.jar;./lib/swing-worker-1.2.jar;." epit.gui.MainGUI

Example 1: Predicting linear B-cell epitopes using FBCPred model

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FBCPred [9] is a recent method for predicting flexible length linear B-cell epitopes using subsequence kernel. An implementation of this method is available on BCPREDS web server. However, users are restricted to submit one protein sequence at a time. In this example, we demonstrate how to use the Predictor application in EpiT and the FBCPred model file provided in the Examples folder to predict potential linear B-cell epitopes. 1. Run EpiT 2. Go to Application menu and select Predictor application 3. Press the Model button to view an open file dialog and use it to enter the ./Examples/models/FBCPred.model 4. Press the Test button to view an open file dialog and use it to enter the file containing the test sequences in fasta format ./Examples/data/test.fasta.txt 5. Press the Output button to view a save file dialog and use it to specify the path and the name of the file that the predictions will be outputted to (e.g., ./Examples/fbcpred.test.out.txt). 6. Set the peptide length to 14 (default value for FBCPred method). 7. Press the Predict button to get the predictions (See Figure 1). 8. Change the test file to ./Examples/data/abcpred.blind.txt. This is the blind test set published by Saha et al. [10]. 9. Set the output file to ./Examples/data/fbcpred.abcpred.out.txt. 10.Change the Input format to epitopes list. Note that the peptide length will be changed to -1. This implies that full-length test epitopes will be fed to the model for prediction without applying a sliding window to fix the length of the test peptides submitted to the classifier. 11.Press Predict button to get the predictions (See Figure 2).

Figure 1: Output predictions of applying FBCPred model to antigen sequences in test.fasta.txt.

Figure 2: Output predictions of applying FBCPred model to ABCPred blind test set in abcpred.blind.txt.

Example 2: Developing a Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) for predicting 20-mer Predicting linear B-cell peptides 1- Run EpiT 2- Go to Application menu and select Model builder application. A modified version of Weka explorer will be displayed. 3- Press the open file button and use the open file dialog to open ./Examples/data/BCPred20.nr80.arff. This is the datasets that has been used to develop the 20-mer peptides classifier for BCPred method [11]. Each instance is 20 residues in length and is associated with a binary label to indicate whether the corresponding peptide is a linear B-cell epitope or not. Figure 3 provides some useful information about this dataset. 4- Click the Classify tab. 5- Click Choose button to select the classification method and select epit.classifiers.matrix.PSSMClassifier (See Figure 4). 6- Click Start button to begin a 10-fold cross-validation test to evaluate the PSSM classifier on the BCPred 20-mer dataset. At the end, the program will output the PSSM matrix constructed using the entire training dataset and will also output several performance metrics obtained using the cross-validation test. For more details, please see the Weka explorer tutorial available at: 7- In the result panel, right click on the classifier name and select Save model from the popup menu and save the model as ./Examples/models/pssm.model (See Figure 5).

Figure 3: EpiT model builder, an extended version of Weka GUI explorer.

Figure 4: Selecting the PSSM classifier.

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Figure 5: Saving the PSSM model. Note that, the default setting for the PSSM method is to use negative data for estimating background probabilities. Alternatively, one can disable this option to assume uniform background probabilities. The performance of the PSSM model is that case is lower than the one obtained using negative training data to estimate the background probabilities (See Figure 6)

Figure 6: A reported poor performance of the PSSM model built using positive information only and assuming uniform background probabilities. Example 3: Developing a propensity scale based method for predicting linear B-cell epitopes 1- Run EpiT 2- Go to Application menu and select Model builder application. A modified version of Weka explorer will be displayed. 3- Press the open file button and use the open file dialog to open ./Examples/data/BCPred20.nr80.arff. 4- Click the Classify tab. 5- Click Choose button to select the classification method and select epit.classifiers.propensity.PropensityScale. The default parameter settings for this method are: standard 20 amino acids alphabet, Parkers hydrophilicity scale, and window size = -1. 6- Click Start button to begin a 10-fold cross-validation test to evaluate the PSSM classifier on the BCPred 20-mer dataset.

7- In the result panel, right click on the classifier name and select Save model from the popup menu and save the model as ./Examples/models/parker.model. It should be mentioned that, the EpiT distribution includes 544 amino acid propensity scales extracted from AAIndex. Any of these scales can be used with the PropensityScale classifier instead of the default Parkers hydrophilicity scale. Example 4: Peptide-based and residue-based linear B-cell epitopes prediction using Parkers propensity scale 1. Run EpiT 2. Go to Application menu and select Predictor application 3. Press the Model button to view an open file dialog and use it to enter the ./Examples/models/parker.model 4. Press the Test button to view an open file dialog and use it to enter the file containing the test sequences in fasta format ./Examples/data/test.fasta.txt 5. Press the Output button to view a save file dialog and use it to specify the path and the name of the file that the predictions will be outputted to (e.g., ./Examples/ parker.test.peptide.out.txt). 6. Set the peptide length to 14. Note that, setting the window size to 1 when building parker.model allows us to evaluate it using any Peptide/Window length. Otherwise, we have to use the exact size that has been specified during the training of the model. 7. Press the Predict button to get predictions for each 14-mer peptide in the test sequences. 8. Change the instance type to residue-based. 9. Set the window length to 7 (has to be an odd number) 10.Set the output file to parker.test.residue.out.txt 11.Press the Predict button to get prediction scores for each residue in the test sequences (See Figure 7).

Figure 7: Residue-based classification using parker.model. Example 5: Developing a Nave Bayes classifier for predicting linear Bcell epitopes using amino acid composition information Because the majority of Weka implemented algorithms, including Nave Bayes classifier, are not applicable on datasets with string attributes, EpiT provides a set of filters for converting epitope sequences into feature vectors. 1- Run EpiT 2- Go to Application menu and select Model builder application. A modified version of Weka explorer will be displayed. 3- Press the open file button and use the open file dialog to open ./Examples/data/BCPred20.nr80.arff. 4- Click the Classify tab. 5- Click Choose button to select the classification method and select weka.classifiers.meta.FilteredClassifier.

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6- Left-click on the classifier name to edit the FilteredClassifier properties. Set the classifier to weak.bayes.NaiveBayes. Set the filter to epit.filters.unsupervised.attribute.SequenceComposition. Click OK to close the properties window. 7- Click Start button to begin a 10-fold cross-validation test to evaluate the model on the BCPred 20-mer dataset. 8- In the result panel, right click on the classifier name and select Save model from the popup menu and save the model as ./Examples/models/nbac.model. Example 6: Developing a consensus predictor for predicting flexiblelength linear B-cell epitopes Lets assume that we may have several models for predicting flexible-length linear B-cell epitopes. Our goal is to combine the predictions of these models into a consensus prediction. In general, we expect the consensus method combining several methods to outperform any individual method. There are two ways of obtaining consensus predictions. First, one can use the Predictor application to apply every individual model on the test data. Then, the output predictions can be combined into a consensus prediction (e.g., via importing the predictions into an Excel sheet and combining them or by writing a simple script to combine these predictions). Second, one can use the weak.classifiers.meta.Vote classifier and epit.classifiers.meta.ModelBased to build a consensus predictor and use the Predictor application to apply this consensus predictor to the test data. 1- Run EpiT 2- Go to Application menu and select Model builder application. A modified version of Weka explorer will be displayed. 3- Press the open file button and use the open file dialog to open ./Examples/data/BCPred20.nr80.arff. 4- Click the Classify tab. 5- Click Choose button to select the classification method and select weka.classifiers.meta.Vote. 6- Left-click on the classifier name to edit the Vote classifier properties. For the classifiers property, add two epit.classifiers.meta.ModelBased classifiers and set their ModelFile property to ./Examples\models\FBCPred.model, ./Examples\models\parker.model, respectively.
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7- Select use training set as the test option and click Start button to begin evaluating the consensus model on the BCPred 20-mer dataset. It should be noted that the FBCPred.model was built using FBCPred dataset and in this example the consensus model is evaluated on BCPred 20-mer dataset. Because both datasets were extracted from the BciPep database, the reported performance is expected to be overoptimistic. If your goal, is to evaluated a consensus model of combining FBCPred and Parkers hydrophilicity scale, then you should use the Vote to combine an SMO classifier with subsequence kernel (FBCPred method) and a PropensityScale classifier. 8- In the result panel, right click on the classifier name and select Save model from the popup menu and save the model as ./Examples/models/consensus.model.

Figure 8: Setting the properties of the Vote classifier.

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Example 7: Using EpiT to build a hybrid predictor Briefly, you can follow the approach described in Example 6 to use any Weka meta-classifier to build a hybrid model combining several existing models (each model will be encapsulated in a ModelBased classifier) or to build and evaluate a hybrid model combining several prediction methods. Updating an existing model An interesting feature in EpiT is that it allows anyone to rebuild an existing model. Assume that you have augmented FBCPred dataset with newly reported epitopes data and your goal is to rebuild your own FBCPred model with the modified dataset. Note that in Figure 1, the Predictor application is reporting the classification method and the parameters that have been used to build the original FBCPred model. Therefore, to build your own updated FBCPred model, you can use this information and the Model builder application to evaluate and build your own model. Extending EpiT EpiT is an open source project under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This assures that anyone can freely extend or change this software as long as the modified software will be licensed under the GNU GPL. We encourage bioinformatics developers to participate in EpiT by contributing new components (e.g., filters or machine learning methods), new epitope datasets in Weka accepted formats, or new epitope prediction tools in the form of model files. References [1] Witten, I., Frank, E., 2005. Data mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques, 2nd Edition. Morgan Kaufmann. [2] Chen, J., Liu, H., Yang, J., Chou, K., 2007. Prediction of linear B-cell epitopes using amino acid pair antigenicity scale. Amino Acids 33, 423428. [3] Cui, J., Han, L., Lin, H., Tan, Z., Jiang, L., Cao, Z., Chen, Y., 2006. MHC-BPS: MHC binder prediction server for identifying peptides of flexible lengths from sequence derived physicochemical properties. Immunogenetics 58, 607613.
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[4] EL-Manzalawy, Y., Dobbs, D., Honavar, V., 2008a. On Evaluating MHC-II Binding Peptide Prediction Methods. PLoS ONE 3. [5] Parker, J., Guo, D and, H. R., 1986. New hydrophilicity scale derived from highperformance liquid chromatography peptide retention data: correlation of predicted surface residues with antigenicity and x-ray-derived accessible sites. Biochemistry 25, 54255432. [6] Henikoff, J., Henikoff, S., 1996. Using substitution probabilities to improve positionspecific scoring matrices. Bioinformatics 12, 135143. [7] EL-Manzalawy, Y., Dobbs, D., Honavar, V., 2009. Predicting MHC-II binding affinity using multiple instance regression. Submitted to IEEE/ACM Trans Comput Biol Bioinform. [8] EL-Manzalawy, Y., Dobbs, D., Honavar, V., 2008c. Predicting linear Bcell epitopes using evolutionary information. IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine. [9] EL-Manzalawy, Y., Dobbs, D., Honavar, V., 2008b. Predicting flexible length linear B-cell epitopes. 7th International Conference on Computational Systems Bioinformatics, 121131. [10] Saha, S. and Raghava, G. (2006b). Prediction of continuous B-cell epitopes in an antigen using recurrent neural network. Proteins, 65:40-48. [11] EL-Manzalawy, Y., Dobbs, D., Honavar, V., 2008d. Predicting linear B-cell epitopes using string kernels. J. Mol. Recognit. 21, 243255.

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