Accurately predicting anticancer peptide using an ensemble of heterogeneously trained classifiers

The use of therapeutic peptides for the treatment of cancer has received tremendous attention in recent years. Anticancer peptides (ACPs) are considered new anticancer drugs which have several advantages over chemistry-based drugs including high specificity, strong tumor penetration capacity, and low toxicity level for normal cells. Due to the rise of experimentally verified bioactive peptides, several in silico approaches became imperative for the investigation of the characteristics of ACPs. In this paper, we proposed a new machine learning tool named iACP-RF that uses a combination of several sequence-based features and an ensemble of three heterogeneously trained Random Forest classifiers to accurately predict anticancer peptides. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves an accuracy of 75.9% which outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin. We also achieve 0.52, 75.6%, and 76.2% in terms of Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), Sensitivity, and Specificity, respectively. iACP-RF as a standalone tool and its source code are publicly available at: https://github.com/MLBC-lab/iACP-RF.