Improving the prediction accuracy of protein structural class: Approached with alternating word frequency and normalized Lempel–Ziv complexity

• The two novel features including alternating word frequency and normalized Lempel–Ziv complexity have been proposed.
• We report 83.6%, 81.8% and 83.6% prediction accuracies for 25PDB, 1189 and 640 benchmarks, respectively.
• Comparison of our results with other methods shows that our proposed method is very promising.

Prediction of protein structural class for low-similarity sequences remains a challenging problem. In this study, the new computational method has been developed to predict protein structural class by incorporating alternating word frequency and normalized Lempel–Ziv complexity. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, jackknife cross-validation tests are performed on three widely used benchmark datasets, 25PDB, 1189 and 640, respectively. We report 83.6%, 81.8% and 83.6% prediction accuracies for 25PDB, 1189 and 640 benchmarks, respectively. Comparison of our results with other methods shows that the proposed method is very promising and may provide a cost-effective alternative to predict protein structural class in particular for low-similarity datasets and may at least play an important complementary role to existing methods.