Prediction of Cholecystokinin-Secretory Peptides Using Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory Model Based on Transfer Learning and Hierarchical Attention Network Mechanism

Cholecystokinin (CCK) can make the human body feel full and has neurotrophic and anti-inflammatory effects. It is beneficial in treating obesity, Parkinson’s disease, pancreatic cancer, and cholangiocarcinoma. Traditional biological experiments are costly and time-consuming when it comes to finding and identifying novel CCK-secretory peptides, and there is an urgent need to develop a new computational method to predict new CCK-secretory peptides. This study combines the transfer learning method with the SMILES enumeration data augmentation strategy to solve the data scarcity problem. It establishes a fusion model of the hierarchical attention network (HAN) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), which fully extracts peptide chain features to predict CCK-secretory peptides efficiently. The average accuracy of the proposed method in this study is 95.99%, with an AUC of 98.07%. The experimental results show that the proposed method is significantly superior to other comparative methods in accuracy and robustness. Therefore, this method is expected to be applied to the preliminary screening of CCK-secretory peptides.