A funny thing happened along the way. Actually two important things. First, it turns out there is no such critter as the perfect algorithm. “Data itself is so high dimensional, the biology itself is so complex, that probably the notion of finding the best algorithm to analyze a data set was a little too simplistic,” says Gustavo Stolovitzky, DREAM chair and manager of functional genomics and systems biology, at IBM’s Computational Biology Center. Read more, including DREAM6 details.
DREAM6 Breaks New Ground
August 15, 2011
By John Russell
August 16, 2011 | The Russell Transcript | Roughly five years ago the organizers of DREAM—Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods—set out to find the best algorithms for inferring biological networks from blinded data sets. Emulating the CASP program, they created an annual competition in which researchers downloaded data for a set of challenges and used their favorite algorithms to solve the problem. Winners were announced at the annual DREAM conference, and the results published in an effort to create a valuable resource.