Abstract
Hepatitis is an emerging global threat to public health due to associated mortality, morbidity, cancer and HIV co-infection. Available diagnostics and therapeutics are inadequate to intercept the course and transmission of the disease. Antimicrobial peptides (AMP) are widely studied and broad-spectrum host defense peptides are investigated as a targeted anti-viral. Therefore, it is of interest to describe the supervised identification of anti-hepatitis peptides. We used a hybrid Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm for simultaneous classification and domain feature selection. The described model shows a 10 fold cross-validation accuracy of 94 percent. This is a reliable and a useful tool for the prediction and identification of hepatitis specific drug activity.