HPOLabeler: improving prediction of human protein-phenotype associations by learning to rank

Lizhi Liu, Xiaodi Huang, Hiroshi Mamitsuka, Shanfeng Zhu

Abstract: Annotating human proteins by abnormal phenotypes has become an important topic. Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) is a standardized vocabulary of phenotypic abnormalities encountered in human diseases. As of November 2019, only <4000 proteins have been annotated with HPO. Thus, a computational approach for accurately predicting protein–HPO associations would be important, whereas no methods have outperformed a simple Naive approach in the second Critical Assessment of Functional Annotation, 2013–2014 (CAFA2).