Ricerc@Sapienza

Dissimilarity spaces, along with feature reduction/ selection techniques, are among the mainstream approaches when dealing with pattern recognition problems in structured (and possibly non-metric) domains. In this work, we aim at investigating dissimilarity space representations in a biology-related application, namely protein function classification, as proteins are a seminal example of structured data given their primary and tertiary structures.

Topological Data Analysis is a novel approach, useful whenever data can be described by topological structures such as graphs. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether such tool can be used in order to define a set of descriptors useful for pattern recognition and machine learning tasks. Specifically, we consider a supervised learning problem with the final goal of predicting proteins' physiological function starting from their respective residue contact network.