There is an old trick in sales: compare your product with a weak competitor and you always win. Science has the same trick, and reviewers hunt for it. The honest move is to compare against the strongest published baseline, on the exact same splits, and to split proteins by family so the model cannot cheat by recognising a close cousin it saw in training (like a student who memorised last year's exam because this yea…
If you only do one thing this week: the family-split table
Yang, Wu & Arnold (2019), "Machine-learning-guided directed evolution for protein engineering"
Saturday sandbox
Yang, Wu & Arnold (2019), "Machine-learning-guided directed evolution for protein engineering", Nature Methods 16:687-694. The classic review; read it before week 21