RITA is a standalone software package and Web server for taxonomic assignment of metagenomic sequence reads. By combining homology predictions from BLAST or UBLAST with compositional classifications from a Naive Bayes classifier, RITA is able to achieve very high accuracy on short reads. Unlike other hybrid approaches which combine these predictions for all sequences to be classified, RITA uses a pipeline to first identify cases where both types of classifier are in agreement, which constitute the highest-confidence set. Sequences not classified in this manner are subjected to a series of downstream classification steps.
This work has been accepted for publication:
MacDonald NJ, Parks DH, and Beiko RG. Rapid identification of taxonomic assignments. Accepted to Nucleic Acids Research April 4, 2012.
If you have any questions or bug reports, please let us know at <beiko@cs.dal.ca>.
