α-surface and its application to mining protein data

Given a finite set of points in three dimensional Euclidean space R³, the subset that forms its surface could be different when observed at different levels of detail. In this paper we introduce a notion called α-surface. We present an algorithm that extracts the α-surface from a finite set of points in R³. We apply the algorithm to extracting the α-surfaces of proteins and discover patterns from these surface structures using a pattern discovery algorithm. We then use these patterns to classify the proteins. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach