Correcting mistakes in predicting distributions.

Abstract

Many applications monitor predictions of a whole range of features for biological datasets, e.g. the fraction of secreted human proteins in the human proteome. Results and error estimates are typically derived from publications. Here, we present a simple, alternative approximation that uses performance estimates of methods to error-correct the predicted distributions. This approximation uses the confusion matrix (TP true positives, TN true negatives, FP false positives and FN false negatives) describing the performance of the prediction tool for correction. As proof-of-principle, the correction was applied to a two-class (membrane/not) and to a seven-class (localization) prediction. Datasets and a simple JavaScript tool available freely for all users at http://www.rostlab.org/services/distributions. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.