%0 Journal Article %A Patrick D. Schloss %T Application of database-independent approach to assess the quality of OTU picking methods %D 2016 %R 10.1101/042812 %J bioRxiv %P 042812 %X Assigning 16S rRNA gene sequences to operational taxonomic units (OTUs) allows microbial ecologists to overcome the inconsistencies and biases within bacterial taxonomy and provides a strategy for clustering similar sequences that do not have representatives in a reference database. I have applied the Matthew’s correlation coefficient to assess the ability of 15 reference-independent and-dependent clustering algorithms to assign sequences to OTUs. This metric quantifies the ability of an algorithm to reflect the relationships between sequences without the use of a reference and can be applied to any dataset or method. The most consistently robust method was the average neighbor algorithm; however, for some datasets other algorithms matched its performance. %U https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/03/08/042812.full.pdf