The amino acid composition of a protein provides basic information for solving many problems in bioinformatics. We propose a new method that uses biologically relevant similarity between amino acids to determine the amino acid composition, where the BOLOSUM matrix is exploited to define a similarity measure between amino acids. Futhermore, to extract more information from a protein sequence than conventional methods for determining amino acid composition, we exploit the concepts of spectral analysis of signals such as radar and speech signals-the concepts of time-dependent analysis, time resolution, and frequency resolution. The proposed method was applied to predict subcellular localization of proteins, and showed significantly improved performance over previous methods for amino acid composition estimation.