The Chou–Fasman method is an empirical technique for the prediction of secondary structures in proteins, originally developed in the 1970s by Peter Y. Chou and Gerald D.
[5] The original Chou–Fasman parameters found some strong tendencies among individual amino acids to prefer one type of secondary structure over others.
These original parameters have since been shown to be unreliable[7] and have been updated from a current dataset, along with modifications to the initial algorithm.
[8] The Chou–Fasman method takes into account only the probability that each individual amino acid will appear in a helix, strand, or turn.
This lack of cooperativity increases its computational efficiency but decreases its accuracy, since the propensities of individual amino acids are often not strong enough to render a definitive prediction.