Reason of excluding homolog protein in protein subcellular location prediction

Question

[ruhi.jamali]

Hi everyone, Protein localization (subcellular localization) is an active field of research. In previously published papers on this problem, people exclude the homologous proteins from data sets. I was wondering if any body knows the reason of excluding homologous proteins?! Is it for preventing the bias of precision/recall or preventing from employing the homology information?! Thank you

Answer 1

[fishgolden]

It depends on the steps (training or testing) that exclusion procedure were used. However, basically, it is "for preventing the bias of precision/recall or preventing from employing the homology information”. In addition, for preventing a predictor to become biased to proteins which belong to large family (many similar proteins are included in the training dataset).