The phrase "modest subset" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when you want to refer to a small portion of a larger group. For example, "We have chosen a modest subset of volunteers for our initial pilot project."
A cutoff value of 2.70 µg/ml identified a modest subset of ALS patients (sensitivity: 32%) while maintaining high specificity versus controls (specificity: 78% vs. all study controls, 100% vs. mimic disease controls).
Most of the above studies relied either on bacterial culture, which queries only a minority of the organisms present, or low throughput sequencing methods that identify only a modest subset of bacterial lineages, leaving the more global responses of bacterial communities to smoking only partially characterized.
It is important to note that our cluster categorization is limited by the fact that it uses only a modest subset of the liver-specific TFs known to control tissue-specific gene expression (Odom et al., 2006); inclusion of more TFs may reveal that regions with higher combinatorial binding (e.g., 4TF and 5TF clusters) would be even more often shared among different mouse species.
11 In summary, unlike the original report of the FTO association with OA, which was able to adjust for BMI only on a modest subset of female cases and controls, the present study gives a definitive answer showing that the effect of this variant on OA is solely due to its effect on BMI.
Third, our approach does not directly reveal which transcription factors control these regulatory regions, as would a more direct comparison (Kunarso et al., 2010; Paris et al., 2013; Schmidt et al., 2010), which in turn can only capture a modest subset of active regions.
A discrepancy was usually observed between an overall modest survival improvement and the existence of small subset of patients achieving an incredibly long-term response-stabilisation or even CR, far beyond what could be reasonably expected a priori.
CFY GFP+ ductal cells showed a modest increase in expression of numerous β cell specific genes, consistent with a small subset of ductal cells undergoing β cell conversion.
The tendency of RNA DNA hybrids to be resistant to acquisition of DNA methylation [ 16] finds some support from our data, but the modest degree of relative hypomethylation indicates that the effects occur at only a small subset of loci.
Sterelny (1990) describes his teleological theory as "modest" because it only attempts to give an account of innate representations and he assumes these to be a relatively small subset of the complete set of our mental representations.
A modest but healthy subset of small businesses has even prospered on the Web alone.
Second, on empirical datasets, the k-means method tends to select a relatively modest number of subsets – never more than double the number of features in the dataset itself (e.g. individual codon positions in individual genes), and often many fewer.
