AI4AVP: An antiviral peptides predictor in deep learning approach with generative adversarial network data augmentation

Motivation: Antiviral peptides (AVPs) from various sources suggest the possibility of developing peptide drugs for treating viral diseases. Because of the increasing number of identified AVPs and the advances in deep learning theory, it is reasonable to experiment with peptide drug design using in silico methods. Results: We collected the most up-to-date AVPs and used deep learning to construct a sequence-based binary classifier. A generative adversarial network was employed to augment the number of AVPs in the positive training dataset and enable our deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) model to learn from the negative dataset. Our classifier outperformed other state-of-the-art classifiers when using the testing dataset. We have placed the trained classifiers on a user-friendly web server, AI4AVP, for the research community.