Gold standard benchmark This page is claimed to contain a gold standard benchmark for viral genome assembly.
https://github.com/cbg-ethz/5-virus-mix
The claim is here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5411778/
&quot;This data set was recently presented as a gold standard benchmark (Di Giallonardo et al. 2014)&quot;
But at (Di Giallonardo et al. 2014) I can only find that mention:
&quot;We previously estimated the frequencies of the virus strains in the 5-virus-mix by amplifying the protease gene using single-genome amplification (SGA), the current gold standard for studying diversity of virus populations&quot;.
That doesn't seem to mean precisely that the dataset is a gold standard benchmark for genome assembly but, as I understand, that SGA is a gold standard for something else.
My question is: is it? And who decided it is? Is still valid? Is there an official list of results somewhere for this benchmark set?
I tried to contact the owner of the page but still no answer.
Anyone can declare anything to be a &quot;gold-standard&quot;, the term is meaningless. All if actually means is, &quot;we think this is the test that everything else should be benchmarked against&quot;.