Evidence map›Paper›PMID 37862229›Full record

ArticleBioinformatics (Oxford, England)2023

A safety framework for flow decomposition problems via integer linear programming.

Fernando H C Dias, Manuel Cáceres, Lucia Williams, Brendan Mumey, Alexandru I Tomescu

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
0.4field-weighted citation impact, top 34% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed, 2 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Minimum flow decomposition guided by saturating subflows.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.

Fernando H C DiasDepartment of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki 00560, Finland.
Manuel CáceresDepartment of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki 00560, Finland.ORCID 0000-0003-0235-6951
Lucia WilliamsSchool of Computing, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717, United States.
Brendan MumeySchool of Computing, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717, United States.
Alexandru I TomescuDepartment of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki 00560, Finland.ORCID 0000-0002-5747-8350
University of Helsinki · FIMontana State University · US

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

motivationMany important problems in Bioinformatics (e.g. assembly or multiassembly) admit multiple solutions, while the final objective is to report only one. A common approach to deal with this uncertainty is finding "safe" partial solutions (e.g. contigs) which are common to all solutions. Previous research on safety has focused on polynomially time solvable problems, whereas many successful and natural models are NP-hard to solve, leaving a lack of "safety tools" for such problems. We propose the first method for computing all safe solutions for an NP-hard problem, "minimum flow decomposition" (MFD). We obtain our results by developing a "safety test" for paths based on a general integer linear programming (ILP) formulation. Moreover, we provide implementations with practical optimizations aimed to reduce the total ILP time, the most efficient of these being based on a recursive group-testing procedure.

resultsExperimental results on transcriptome datasets show that all safe paths for MFDs correctly recover up to 90% of the full RNA transcripts, which is at least 25% more than previously known safe paths. Moreover, despite the NP-hardness of the problem, we can report all safe paths for 99.8% of the over 27 000 non-trivial graphs of this dataset in only 1.5 h. Our results suggest that, on perfect data, there is less ambiguity than thought in the notoriously hard RNA assembly problem. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://github.com/algbio/mfd-safety.

Indexed as

AlgorithmsProgramming, LinearComputational BiologyRNARNA

Identifiers

PMID37862229
PMCPMC10628435
OpenAlexW4387823430

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.