FEGS: a novel feature extraction model for protein sequences and its applications

BACKGROUND: Feature extraction of protein sequences is widely used in various research areas related to protein analysis, such as protein similarity analysis and prediction of protein functions or interactions. RESULTS: In this study, we introduce FEGS (Feature Extraction based on Graphical and Statistical features), a novel feature extraction model of protein sequences, by developing a new technique for graphical representation of protein sequences based on the physicochemical properties of amino acids and effectively employing the statistical features of protein sequences. By fusing the graphical and statistical features, FEGS transforms a protein sequence into a 578-dimensional numerical vector. When FEGS is applied to phylogenetic analysis on five protein sequence data sets, its performance is notably better than all of the other compared methods. CONCLUSION: The FEGS method is carefully designed, which is practically powerful for extracting features of protein sequences. The current version of FEGS is developed to be user-friendly and is expected to play a crucial role in the related studies of protein sequence analyses. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-021-04223-3.