TIPP: taxonomic identification and phylogenetic profiling

MOTIVATION Abundance profiling (also called 'phylogenetic profiling') is a crucial step in understanding the diversity of a metagenomic sample, and one of the basic techniques used for this is taxonomic identification of the metagenomic reads. RESULTS We present taxon identification and phylogenetic profiling (TIPP), a new marker-based taxon identification and abundance profiling method. TIPP combines SAT\'e-enabled phylogenetic placement a phylogenetic placement method, with statistical techniques to control the classification precision and recall, and results in improved abundance profiles. TIPP is highly accurate even in the presence of high indel errors and novel genomes, and matches or improves on previous approaches, including NBC, mOTU, PhymmBL, MetaPhyler and MetaPhlAn.