Searching for Important Amino Acids in DNA-binding Proteins for Histogram Methods

We develop a method capable to identify important amino acids for histogram-based methods predicting DNA-binding propensity. This method can be used both for prediction from sequence information (Tube Histograms) and prediction from structural information (Ball Histograms). We validate our method in prediction experiments using only proteins’ primary structure, achieving favourable accuracies. Moreover, the histogram-based methods equipped with this new searching method also provide interpretable features involving distributions of amino acids.