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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Theses/Dissertations

Optimization

2011

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Adaptive Balancing Of Exploitation With Exploration To Improve Protein Structure Prediction, Tj Brunette May 2011

Adaptive Balancing Of Exploitation With Exploration To Improve Protein Structure Prediction, Tj Brunette

Open Access Dissertations

The most significant impediment for protein structure prediction is the inadequacy of conformation space search. Conformation space is too large and the energy landscape too rugged for existing search methods to consistently find near-optimal minima. Conformation space search methods thus have to focus exploration on a small fraction of the search space. The ability to choose appropriate regions, i.e. regions that are highly likely to contain the native state, critically impacts the effectiveness of search. To make the choice of where to explore requires information, with higher quality information resulting in better choices. Most current search methods are designed to …