K. Cherkauer & J. Shavlik (1993).
Protein Structure Prediction: Selecting Salient Features From Large Candidate Pools. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, pp. 74-82, Bethesda, MD. AAAI Press.

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Abstract:

We introduce a parallel approach, ``DT-Select, '' for selecting features used by inductive learning algorithms to predict protein secondary structure. DT-Select is able to rapidly choose small, nonredundant feature sets from pools containing hundreds of thousands of potentially useful features. It does this by building a decision tree, using features from the pool, that classifies a set of training examples. The features included in the tree provide a compact description of the training data and are thus suitable for use as inputs to other inductive learning algorithms. Empirical experiments in the protein secondary-structure task, in which sets of complex features chosen by DT-Select are used to augment a standard artificial neural network representation, yield surprisingly little performance gain, even though features are selected from very large feature pools. We discuss some possible reasons for this result.

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