Abstract: Hidden Markov models (HMM) are powerful machine learning tools successfully applied to problems of computational Molecular Biology. In a predictive task, the HMM is endowed with a decoding algorithm in order to assign the most probable state path, and in turn the class labeling, to an unknown sequence. The Viterbi and the posterior decoding algorithms are the most common. The former is very efficient when one path dominates, while the latter, even though does not guarantee to preserve the automaton grammar, is more effective when several concurring paths have similar probabilities. A third good alternative is 1-best, which was shown to perform equal or better than Viterbi.