Supplementary Figure 1: Overview of Salmon’s method and components and execution timeline.

Salmon accepts either raw (green arrows) or aligned (gray arrow) reads as input. When processing quasi-mappings or aligned reads, Salmon executes an online inference algorithm. This ensures that transcript abundance estimates are available to estimate weights for the rich equivalence classes, and to consider the appropriate conditional probabilities when learning the experimental parameters and foreground bias models. After a fragment’s contributions to the online abundance estimates and bias models have been computed, the fragment is placed into an appropriate equivalence class (or one is created if it does not yet exist). Once all of the fragments have been observed, the initial abundances and fragment equivalence classes are passed to the offline inference module. The offline module learns the background bias models (based on initial abundance estimates) and then corrects the effective transcript lengths to account for the appropriate biases. Finally, the offline inference algorithm (EM or VBEM) is run over the reduced representation of the data until convergence. Once estimation is complete, posterior samples are generated via Gibbs sampling or a bootstrap procedure if the user has requested this.