α-surface and its application to mining protein data

Given a finite set of Points it, three dimensional Euclidean space R 3, the subset that forms its surface could be different when observed in different levels of details. In this paper we introduce a notion called a-surface. We present an algorithm that extracts the alpha-surface from a finite set of points it? R-3. We apply the algorithm to extracting the alpha-surfaces of proteins and discover patterns from these surface structures, using the pattern discovery algorithm we developed earlier. We then use these patterns to classify the proteins. Experimental results show the good performance of the proposed approach.