This preprocessing step can be performed in parallel with the molecular biology. Then, given a set of spectra, simply look up each peak to find fragment explanations and intersect the sets. This intersection can be analyzed in a probabilistic framework that predicts how likely it is that the intersection will be able to resolve all ambiguities. Following is a set of figures giving the intuition. The heights of the bars are representative of the respective probabilities.
Correctness is a function of the biological ground truth.
Appearance is a function of our observations. We can eliminate a fragment unless it appears in all experiments. Finally, a set of labelings is interpretable if all fragments are either correct or eliminatable. It is therefore attractive for high-throughput functional genomics studies. However, the information extracted is rather minimalist compared to NMR or Xray crystallography, so a large burden is placed on the algorithmic problems of experiment planning and data analysis.