Refining filtering criteria for accurate taxonomic classification of ancient metagenomic data

Abstract

Taxonomic profiling is a key component of ancient metagenomic analysis, however it is also susceptible to false-positive identifications. In particular, classification tools from the Kraken family, such as Kraken2 and KrakenUniq, are highly sensitive to the choice of filtering options. To address this issue, various filtering approaches have been proposed. In this study, I conduct a comprehensive benchmarking of different filtering strategies using simulated microbial and environmental ancient metagenomic data. I evaluate these approaches based on the balance between sensitivity and specificity of ground truth reconstruction (F1-score), and propose an optimal thresholding strategy tailored to specific sequencing depths in ancient metagenomic datasets.