Figure 3

A simple example of the ensemble algorithm. The input (top left) is a set of GO terms, the GO graph, and association between genes and GO terms. The example shows the ensemble process of a single gene G. First, the pipeline-specific gene profiles are calculated (top right). A GO term is assigned a value ‘1’ in the profile if G is associated with it or with at least one of its descendants and ‘0’ otherwise. Second, the combined profile of G is the sum of its pipeline-specific profiles. The scores in the combined profile show how many pipelines agree with each of G’s GO term association. Given a threshold k, the GO terms with a combined score lower than k are removed to provide a final list of GO terms associated with G (bottom). Each different value of k constitutes a different variant of the algorithm.