In recent years several different fields, such as ecology, medicine and microbiology, have experienced an unprecedented development due to the possibility of direct sequencing of microbioimic samples. Among problems that researchers in the field have to deal with, taxonomic classification of metagenomic reads is one of the most challenging. State of the art methods classify single reads with almost 100% precision. However, very often, the performance in terms of recall falls at about 50%. As a consequence, state-of-the-art methods are indeed capable of correctly classify only half of the reads in the sample. How to achieve better performances in terms of overall quality of classification remains a largely unsolved problem. |
