Mining protein surfaces

Given a nite set of discrete points in three dimen-sional Euclidean space R 3, the subset that forms its surface could be dierent when observed in dierent levels of details. In this paper, we introduce a notion called -surface. We present an algorithm that ex-tracts the -surface from a nite set of points in R 3 We apply the algorithm to extracting the -surfaces of proteins and discover patterns from these surface structures, using the pattern discovery algorithm we developed earlier. We then use these patterns to clas-sify the proteins. Experimental results show the good performance of the proposed approach.