  The widening gap between known proteins and their functions has encouraged
the development of methods to automatically infer annotations. Automatic
functional annotation of proteins is expected to meet the conflicting
requirements of maximizing annotation coverage, while minimizing erroneous
functional assignments. This trade-off imposes a great challenge in designing
intelligent systems to tackle the problem of automatic protein annotation. In
this work, we present a system that utilizes rule mining techniques to predict
metabolic pathways in prokaryotes. The resulting knowledge represents
predictive models that assign pathway involvement to UniProtKB entries. We
carried out an evaluation study of our system performance using
cross-validation technique. We found that it achieved very promising results in
pathway identification with an F1-measure of 0.982 and an AUC of 0.987. Our
prediction models were then successfully applied to 6.2 million
UniProtKB/TrEMBL reference proteome entries of prokaryotes. As a result,
663,724 entries were covered, where 436,510 of them lacked any previous pathway
annotations.
