I hope that the evaluation framework introduced in the paper can become used by other researchers working on mutational signatures.
The methods are widely applicable to other DNA sequence clustering problems. Someone may obtain contradicting results with a new algorithm. In such a case, rerunning our scripts on the same or new data may help elucidate the source of the differences between the results.
The method is trained on the data that were available, but it is meant to be re-trainable as soon as new data are published. It would be great to be really sure that even someone else will be able to do it. In case we receive any feedback, we would be really happy to improve our Github repository so as to make the reproduction easier!
Most of the material is available through Jupyter notebooks in GitHub, and it should be easy to reproduce with the help of Binder. With the notebooks, you could experiment with different parameters to the ones analyzed in the paper. It also contains a large dataset of physical parameters of galaxies analysed in this work. We expect this work to be easily reproducible in the steps described in the repository.
Metadata annotation is key to reproducibility in sequencing experiments. Reproducing this research using the scripts provided will also show the current level of annotation in years since 2015 when the paper was published.
