[1] Different algorithms are evaluated by their ability to predict the Gene Ontology (GO) terms in the categories of Molecular Function, Biological Process, and Cellular Component.
Participants are expected to submit their predictions by the submission deadline, after which they are assessed according to a set of specific metrics.
[2] The process of experimentally determining the role of a protein in the cell, is an expensive and time consuming task.
The experiment consists of three phases: Organizers provide protein sequences with unknown or incomplete function to community and set the deadline for the submission of predictions After all predictions are stored and the experiment enters a waiting period in which protein functions are expected to accumulate in public databases Predictors are ranked according to their performance.
The CAFA experiment is conducted by the Automated Function Prediction (AFP) Special Interest Group (AFP/SIG).
The results showed that current function prediction algorithms perform significantly better than a simple domain assignment or a straightforward use of BLAST package.