Lot of variation in masif_ppi_search outputs? about masif HOT 2 CLOSED

There is a stochastic step in the alignment process - a random sampling consensus (RANSAC) algorithm (take a look at supplementary figure 6).

Basically you use the fingerprints to take correspondences between the patches, but those correspondences are not all correct. To find 'correct' correspondences, the RANSAC algorithm randomly chooses subsets of 3 correspondences and tests alignments. After running for a predetermined number of iterations, it chooses the best alignment.

Indeed, this is a non-differentiable element of the pipeline, dependenet on a set of hand-crafted parameters (e.g. number of iterations, etc). Itshould really be replaced by a non-stochastic, fully differentiable network, IMO.

For the masif-search results in the paper we took the median result after a bunch of runs.

from masif.

Ah, thank you for the explanation!

from masif.