Inverse Potts model improves accuracy of phylogenetic profiling

Phylogenetic profiling is a powerful computational method for revealing the functions of function-unknown genes. Although conventional similarity metrics in phylogenetic profiling achieved high prediction accuracy, they have two estimation biases: an evolutionary bias and a spurious correlation bias. While previous studies reduced the evolutionary bias by considering a phylogenetic tree, few studies have analyzed the spurious correlation bias.

To reduce the spurious correlation bias, we developed metrics based on the inverse Potts model (IPM) for phylogenetic profiling. We also developed a metric based on both the IPM and a phylogenetic tree. In an empirical dataset analysis, we demonstrated that these IPM-based metrics improved the prediction performance of phylogenetic profiling. In addition, we found that the integration of several metrics, including the IPM-based metrics, had superior performance to a single metric.

The source code is freely available at https://github.com/fukunagatsu/Ipm.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.