percolator

The first step in analyzing an mass spectrometry assay is to match the harvested spectra against a target database using database search engines such as Sequest and Mascot, a process that renders list of peptide-spectrum matches. However, it is not trivial to assess the accuracy of these identifications. Percolator uses a semi-supervised machine learning to discriminate correct from incorrect peptide-spectrum matches, and calculates accurate statistics such as q-value (FDR) and posterior error probabilities.

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