Compact Class-Conditional Attribute Category Clustering: Amino Acid Grouping for Enhanced HIV-1 Protease Cleavage Classification

Categorical attributes are common in many classification tasks, presenting certain challenges as the number of categories grows. This situation can affect data handling, negatively impacting the building time of models, their complexity and, ultimately, their classification performance. In order to mitigate these issues, this research proposes a novel preprocessing technique for grouping attribute categories in classification datasets. This approach combines the exact representation of the association between categorical values in a Euclidean space, clustering methods and attribute quality metrics to group similar attribute categories based on their contribution to the classification task. To estimate its effectiveness, the proposal is evaluated within the context of HIV-1 protease cleavage site prediction, where each attribute represents an amino acid that can take multiple possible values. The results obtained on HIV-1 real-world datasets show a significant reduction in the number of categories per attribute, with an average reduction percentage ranging from 74% to 81%. This reduction leads to simplified data representations and improved classification performances compared to not preprocessing. Specifically, improvements of up to 0.07 in accuracy and 0.19 in geometric mean are observed across different datasets and classification algorithms. Additionally, extensive simulations on synthetic datasets with varied characteristics are carried out, providing consistent and reliable results that validate the robustness of the proposal. These findings highlight the capability of the developed method to enhance cleavage prediction, which could potentially contribute to understanding viral processes and developing targeted therapeutic strategies.