The phrase "a rather small subset" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing a portion of a larger group that is limited in size or scope.
Example: "In our research, we focused on a rather small subset of the population to gather more detailed data."
Alternatives: "a relatively minor group" or "a somewhat limited portion".
On cable, they compete weekly for the loyalty of a rather small subset of the American viewing public, a pool Mr. Barnes defines as "the 10 million who are political junkies, who are interested in public affairs".
Vignon and colleagues show no changes of the E' wave in a rather small subset of intensive care unit patients, and again several issues have to be kept in mind.
A rather small cell subset can hold or acquire stem potentials, gaining aggressiveness and increasing expectancy of recurrence.
Seizing these new opportunities is tempting: some researchers have been trapped by the sheer amount of datasets made available by leading data-driven companies, which are either directed towards the companies' own prosperity or representing rather small subsets (e.g. of users).
It is unlikely that the sum total of interactions inferred from the two-hybrid analysis occur in a single complex; rather, a small subset of these interactions may be in force at a given moment.
Another important gap, which could easily be closed, is that between A-Life (or rather, the small subset of it that is concerned with the OoL) and the "traditional" OoL community.
The discrepancy between our study and theirs may be due to level of resolution afforded by the analysis of dozens of complete and draft genome sequences, as well as the Bayesian analysis programs utilized in our study, providing a detailed analysis of recombination across entire core genomes rather than a very small subset of selected genes as in MLST.
Given the sigmoidal distribution of promiscuity scores (supplementary fig. S4, Supplementary Material online), we conclude that promiscuity is not a general characteristic of ECM domains, but rather, restricted to a small subset of ECM domains in which high promiscuity likely plays some functionally important role.
It's all part of being not a "gay writer" but a writer who is gay; of stories I tell that draw on autobiography being relevant to the general population rather than to a small subset of it.
Indeed, from the point of view of risk assessment, Calabrese and colleagues urge that soil pica be seen "as an expected, although highly variable, activity in a normal population of young children, rather than an unusual activity in a small subset of the population".
