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The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A large-scale benchmark study of existing algorithms for taxonomy-independent microbial community analysis

Open access
Sun, Y., Cai, Y., Huse, S. M., Knight, R., Farmerie, W. G., Wang, X., Mai, V.·2012·Briefings in Bioinformatics

Abstract

Recent advances in massively parallel sequencing technology have created new opportunities to probe the hidden world of microbes. Taxonomy-independent clustering of the 16S rRNA gene is usually the first step in analyzing microbial communities. Dozens of algorithms have been developed in the last decade, but a comprehensive benchmark study is lacking. Here, we survey algorithms currently used by microbiologists, and compare seven representative methods in a large-scale benchmark study that addresses several issues of concern. A new experimental protocol was developed that allows different algorithms to be compared using the same platform, and several criteria were introduced to facilitate a quantitative evaluation of the clustering performance of each algorithm. We found that existing methods vary widely in their outputs, and that inappropriate use of distance levels for taxonomic assignments likely resulted in substantial overestimates of biodiversity in many studies. The benchmark study identified our recently developed ESPRIT-Tree, a fast implementation of the average linkage-based hierarchical clustering algorithm, as one of the best algorithms available in terms of computational efficiency and clustering accuracy.

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Metadata

Authors
Sun, Y., Cai, Y., Huse, S. M., Knight, R., Farmerie, W. G., Wang, X., & Mai, V.
Venue
Briefings in Bioinformatics
Published
2011-04-27
Volume
13
Issue
1
Pages
107-121
ISSN
  • 1467-5463 (ISSN-L)
  • 1477-4054
OpenAlex
W2130208436
Cited by
170
References
4
FWCI
6.94
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A large-scale benchmark study of existing algorithms for taxonomy-independent microbial community analysis. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/bib/bbr009
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Sun, Y., Cai, Y., Huse, S. M., Knight, R., Farmerie, W. G., Wang, X., & Mai, V. (2012). A large-scale benchmark study of existing algorithms for taxonomy-independent microbial community analysis. Briefings in Bioinformatics. https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbr009

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.