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by maga 1799 days ago
A curious non-biologist here: how valuable are these low confidence predictions for biologists? In other words, is it hard to predict but easy to check situation as with, say, prime numbers in mathematics?
2 comments

The medium-confidence predictions are great for grounding or sourcing intuition. If you're trying to divide up a protein for an experiment and you have to choose where to divy it up - you'd like to use even a bad prediction to help weight an otherwise completely random approach. AND there are great methods to help with this, but they're often custom, time-consuming, and out-of-field for most. So being able to very quickly spot-check using a uniform state-of-the art, for any arbitrary protein, makes it actually pretty useful for certain kinds of pre-experimental guidance.
Some are valuable for the reasons the other person responding noted, but some of the low confidence predictions may also be high confidence predictions of a disordered class of protein that doesn't have a standard rest state. So it's useful work one way or the other.