PredIL13: Stacking a variety of machine and deep learning methods with ESM-2 language model for identifying IL13-inducing peptides

Interleukin (IL)-13 has emerged as one of the recently identified cytokine. Since IL-13 causes the severity of COVID-19 and alters crucial biological processes, it is urgent to explore novel molecules or peptides capable of including IL-13. Computational prediction has received attention as a complementary method to in-vivo and in-vitro experimental identification of IL-13 inducing peptides, because experimental identification is time-consuming, laborious, and expensive. A few computational tools have been presented, including the IL13Pred and iIL13Pred. To increase prediction capability, we have developed PredIL13, a cutting-edge ensemble learning method with the latest ESM-2 protein language model. This method stacked the probability scores outputted by 168 single-feature machine/deep learning models, and then trained a logistic regression-based meta-classifier with the stacked probability score vectors. The key technology was to implement ESM-2 and to select the optimal single-feature models according to their absolute weight coefficient for logistic regression (AWCLR), an indicator of the importance of each single-feature model. Especially, the sequential deletion of single-feature models based on the iterative AWCLR ranking (SDIWC) method constructed the meta-classifier consisting of the top 16 single-feature models, named PredIL13, while considering the model’s accuracy. The PredIL13 greatly outperformed the-state-of-the-art predictors, thus is an invaluable tool for accelerating the detection of IL13-inducing peptide within the human genome.