GraphTFactor: A graph-based approach for proteins transcription factor prediction

Abstract

Transcription factors (TFs) play an important role in regulating gene expression, making their identification a fundamental task in computational biology. In this work, we propose GraphTFactor, a novel end-to-end framework that models protein sequences as graphs and directly classifies transcription factors. By encoding sequences into graph structures, the proposed approach naturally handles variable-length inputs while preserving relevant relational information, without imposing length constraints. Experimental results show that GraphTFactor outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of graph-based representations for TF prediction while providing interpretable insights into the sequence regions contributing to the model's predictions. To support reproducibility and practical adoption, we release an open-source software package and an interactive web application that let users easily perform TF prediction on custom sequences.