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How Good are Your Metagenomic Binning Results?
Strategies and tools for evaluating metagenomic binning results
Natural environments such as lake water, soil and niches of the human body (gut, skin, etc.) are home to trillions of microbes. These microscopic communities are complex and diverse, and we can learn a lot about their effects by studying their composition and interactions. If you have come across my article on Software Tools for Reference-free Binning of Metagenomes, you may know that there are different approaches developed throughout the past few decades to perform metagenomic binning where you place sequences into bins corresponding to different taxonomic groups (species, genera, etc.).
How can we evaluate the results produced by metagenomic binning tools?
In this article, I will introduce some tools and techniques to evaluate binning results obtained from reference-free binning tools. These tools are popular as they provide the advantage of identifying novel species which have not been published in available reference databases.
Cluster Analysis
Metagenomic binning tools use different clustering approaches and you can use the following popular evaluation metrics to evaluate the final binning results.
- Precision
- Recall
