{PDF} Neural Networks and Genome Informatics C.H. Wu and J.W. McLarty (Eds.)

This book serves well to introduce the reader to the literature on the applications of neural networks to bioinformatics. It falls short however in giving an in-depth view of how neural networks operate and does not include any source code. Performance issues with the use of neural networks in genome informatics should have been given a more careful treatment. Considering its price, this is disappointing. A reader could obtain the required reading material on this subject from an online search. An instructor in a course in bioinformatics might use this book as a reference source however. Those who have used neural networks in other fields might be able to use the book as a guide to applying them to genome informatics. Thus the book could be viewed as a (very expensive) literature review article, but it does include some interesting remarks at various places: 1. Amino acid groupings that are found automatically by a Kohonen self-organizing map. 2. Feature representation and input encoding. 3. The discussion on cross-validation. 4. The discussion on protein secondary structure prediction. Genetic algorithms are mentioned here, so readers not familiar with these will have to gain the background elsewhere.