When using or developing experimental and observational methods it is crucial to assess the method performance in an effort to ensure that the information it provides reflects reality. For experimental biologists this often means conducting carefully chosen control experiments with alternative methods or different experimental settings. More rigorous assessment, particularly for high-throughput or large-scale methods, often requires the use of ‘ground truth’ or ‘gold standard’ data sets. But talk to different people and you will get different answers regarding what ‘ground truth’ or ‘gold standard’ data is. This often includes a nice historical explanation of where the term ‘ground truth’ comes from.
For developers of signal processing and image analysis algorithms though, the situation is clearer; the ground truth is the signal or image you start with. But add a living system into the mix and things get far more complicated. The Editorial in the November issue of Nature Methods discusses the challenges facing developers and users of algorithms for automated analysis of biological data, with a focus on image data. In short, traditional ground truth data is often insufficient. The addition of integrated-editing and change-logging capabilities to these software tools can increase the quality of the analysis, aid further algorithm development and increase the likelihood of biologists adopting the software in the first place.
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Let’s give statistics the attention it deserves
Let’s give statistics the attention it deserves
Guidelines for algorithms and software in Nature Methods