IMAGO: An Improved Model Based on Attention Mechanism for Enhanced Protein Function Prediction

Protein function prediction plays an important role in the field of biology. With the wide application of deep learning in the field of bioinformatics, more and more natural language processing (NLP) technologies are applied to the downstream tasks in the field of bioinformatics, and it has also shown excellent performance in protein function prediction. Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks and other biological attributes contain rich information critical for annotating protein functions. However, existing deep learning networks still suffer from overfitting and noise issues, resulting in low accuracy in protein function prediction. Consequently, developing efficient models for protein function prediction remains a popular and challenging topic in the application of NLP in bioinformatics. In this study, we propose a novel protein function prediction model based on attention mechanisms, termed IMAGO. This model employs the Transformer pre-training process, integrating multi-head attention mechanisms and regularization techniques, and optimizes the loss function to effectively reduce overfitting and noise issues during training. It generates more robust embeddings, ultimately improving the accuracy of protein function prediction. Experimental results on <i>human</i> and <i>mouse</i> datasets indicate that our model surpasses other protein function prediction models across multiple metrics. Thus, this efficient, stable, and accurate deep learning model holds significant promise for protein function prediction.