1,721,037 research outputs found
The Book Review Column 1
No full textWelcome to the Book Reviews Column. We hope to bring you at least three reviews of books every month. In this column three books are reviewed. 1. Algorithms on strings, trees, and sequences: computer science and computational biology by Dan Gusfield. Reviewed by Gary Benson. This is an encyclopedic book on algorithms in computer science motivated by biological applications and (gasp!) actually used in such applications. 2. Verification of Sequential and Concurrent Programs by Krzysztof R. Apt and Ernst-Rüdiger Olderog. Reviewed by Anish Arora. This is a book on verification that is (according to the review) suitable as a text in a grad course. 3. Algorithms and Programming: Problems and Solutions by Alexander Shen. Reviewed by Jerry James. This is a quirky book of, as the title suggests, problems and solutions. The review suggests it might be used by a teacher as a source of problems and to refine ones own skills
Practical Algorithms and Fixed-Parameter Tractability for the Single Individual SNP Haplotyping Problem
No full textSingle nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are the most frequent form of human genetic variation, of foremost importance for a variety of applications including medical diagnostic, phylogenies and drug design.
The complete SNPs sequence information from each of the two copies of a given chromosome in a diploid genome is called a haplotype. The Haplotyping Problem for a single individual is as follows: Given a set of fragments from one individual’s DNA, find a maximally consistent pair of SNPs haplotypes (one per chromosome copy) by removing data “errors” related to sequencing errors, repeats, and paralogous recruitment. Two versions of the problem, i.e. the Minimum Fragment Removal (MFR) and the Minimum SNP Removal (MSR), are considered.
The Haplotyping Problem was introduced in [8], where it was proved that both MSR and MFR are polynomially solvable when each fragment covers a set of consecutive SNPs (i.e., it is a gapless fragment), and NP-hard in general. The original algorithms of [8] are of theoretical interest, but by no means practical. In fact, one relies on finding the maximum stable set in a perfect graph, and the other is a reduction to a network flow problem. Furthermore, the reduction does not work when there are fragments completely included in others, and neither algorithm can be generalized to deal with a bounded total number of holes in the data. In this paper, we give the first practical algorithms for the Haplotyping Problem, based on Dynamic Programming. Our algorithms do not require the fragments to not include each other, and are polynomial for each constant k bounding the total number of holes in the data. For m SNPs and n fragments, we give an O(mn^{2k+2}) algorithm for the MSR problem, and an O(2^{2k} m^2 n+2^{3k} m^3) algorithm for the MFR problem, when each fragment has at most k holes. In particular, we obtain an O(mn^2) algorithm for MSR and an O(m^2 n+m^3) algorithm for MFR on gapless fragments.
Finally, we prove that both MFR and MSR are APX-hard in general
Assessing phylogenetic motif models for predicting transcription factor binding sites
No full textMotivation: A variety of algorithms have been developed to predict transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) within the genome by exploiting the evolutionary information implicit in multiple alignments of the genomes of related species. One such approach uses an extension of the standard position-specific motif model that incorporates phylogenetic information via a phylogenetic tree and a model of evolution. However, these phylogenetic motif models (PMMs) have never been rigorously benchmarked in order to determine whether they lead to better prediction of TFBSs than obtained using simple position weight matrix scanning. Results: We evaluate three PMM-based prediction algorithms, each of which uses a different treatment of gapped alignments, and we compare their prediction accuracy with that of a non-phylogenetic motif scanning approach. Surprisingly, all of these algorithms appear to be inferior to simple motif scanning, when accuracy is measured using a gold standard of validated yeast TFBSs. However, the PMM scanners perform much better than simple motif scanning when we abandon the gold standard and consider the number of statistically significant sites predicted, using column-shuffled 'random' motifs to measure significance. These results suggest that the common practice of measuring the accuracy of binding site predictors using collections of known sites may be dangerously misleading since such collections may be missing 'weak' sites, which are exactly the type of sites needed to discriminate among predictors. We then extend our previous theoretical model of the statistical power of PMM-based prediction algorithms to allow for loss of binding sites during evolution, and show that it gives a more accurate upper bound on scanner accuracy. Finally, utilizing our theoretical model, we introduce a new method for predicting the number of real binding sites in a genome. The results suggest that the number of true sites for a yeast TF is in general several times greater than the number of known sites listed in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Database (SCPD). Among the three scanning algorithms that we test, the MONKEY algorithm has the highest accuracy for predicting yeast TFBSs
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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