2,207 research outputs found

    Compression and the Wheel of Fortune

    No full text
    Data compression techniques hinged on the notion of a motif are presented, interpreted here as a string of intermittently solid and wild characters that recurs more or less frequently in an input sequence or family of sequences. Correspondingly, motif discovery techniques and tools have been devised. This task is made difficult by the circumstance that the number of motifs identifiable in general in a sequence can be exponential in the size of that sequence. A significant gain in the direction of reducing the number of motifs is achieved through the introduction of irredundant motifs, which in intuitive terms are a combination of other motif occurrences. The number of abundant motifs in a sequence is at worst linear in the sequence. It is shown that irredundant motifs can be usefully exploited in lossy compression methods based on textual substitution and suitable for signals as well as text. Preliminary experiments with these fungible strategies at the crossroads of lossless and lossy data compression show performances that improve over popular methods by more than 20% in lossy and 10% in lossless implementations

    Subtle Motifs Discovery for Detection of DNA Regulatory Sites

    No full text
    Abstract: We address the problem of detecting consensus motifs, that occur with subtle variations, across multiple sequences. These are usually functional domains in DNA sequences such as transcriptional binding factors or other regulatory sites. The problem in its generality has been considered difficult and various benchmark data serve as the litmus test for different computational methods. We present a method centered around unsupervised combinatorial pattern discovery. The parameters are chosen using a careful statistical analysis of consensus motifs. This method works well on the benchmark data and is general enough to be extended to a scenario where the variation in the consensus motif includes indels (along with mutations). We also present some results on detection of transcription binding factors in human DNA sequences

    Irredundant tandem motifs

    No full text
    Eliminating the possible redundancy from a set of candidate motifs occurring in an input string is fundamental in many applications. The existing techniques proposed to extract irredundant motifs are not suitable when the motifs to search for are structured, i.e., they are made of two (or several) subwords that co-occur in a text string s of length n. The main effort of this work is studying and characterizing a compact class of tandem motifs, that is, pairs of substrings {m1, m2} occurring in tandem within a maximum distance of d symbols in s, where d is an integer constant given in input. To this aim, we first introduce the concept of maximality, related to four specific conditions that hold only for this class of motifs. Then, we eliminate the remaining redundancy by defining the notion of irredundancy for tandem motifs. We prove that the number of non-overlapping irredundant tandem motifs is O(d2n) which, considering d as a constant, leads to a linear number of tandems in the length of the input string. This is an order of magnitude less than previously developed compact indexes for tandem extraction. The notions and bounds provided for tandem motifs are generalized for the case r≥2, if r is the number of subwords composing the motifs. Finally, we also provide an algorithm to extract irredundant tandem motifs

    Incremental Paradigms of Motif Discovery

    No full text
    We examine the problem of extracting maximal irredundant motifs from a string. A combinatorial argument poses a linear bound on the total number of such motifs, thereby opening the way to the quest for the fastest and most efficient methods of extraction. The basic paradigm explored here is that of iterated updates of the set of irredundant motifs in a string under consecutive unit symbol extensions of the string itself. This approach exposes novel characterizations for the base set of motifs in a string, hinged on notions of partial order. Such properties support the design of ad hoc data structures and constructs, and lead to develop an O(n 3) time incremental discovery algorithm. Key words: 1

    VARUN: Discovering Extensible Motifs under Saturation Constraints

    No full text
    Abstract The discovery of motifs in biosequences is frequently torn between the rigidity of the model on one hand and the abundance of candidates on the other hand. In particular, motifs that include wild cards or "don't cares" escalate exponentially with their number, and this gets only worse if a don't care is allowed to stretch up to some prescribed maximum length. In this paper, a notion of extensible motif in a sequence is introduced and studied, which tightly combines the structure of the motif pattern, as described by its syntactic specification, with the statistical measure of its occurrence count. It is shown that a combination of appropriate saturation conditions and the monotonicity of probabilistic scores over regions of constant frequency afford us significant parsimony in the generation and testing of candidate overrepresented motifs. A suite of software programs called Varun is described, implementing the discovery of extensible motifs of the type considered. The merits of the method are then documented by results obtained in a variety of experiments primarily targeting protein sequence families. Of equal importance seems the fact that the sets of all surprising motifs returned in each experiment are extracted faster and come in much more manageable sizes than would be obtained in the absence of saturation constraints

    Characterization and Extraction of Irredundant Tandem Motifs

    No full text
    We address the problem of extracting pairs of subwords (m1,m2) from a text string s of length n, such that, given also an integer constant d in input, m1 and m2 occur in tandem within a maximum distance of d symbols in s. The main effort of this work is to eliminate the possible redundancy from the candidate set of the so found tandem motifs. To this aim, we first introduce the concept of maximality, characterized by four specific conditions, that we show to be not deducible by the corresponding notion of maximality already defined for “simple” (i.e., non tandem) motifs. Then, we further eliminate the remaining redundancy by defining the concept of irredundancy for tandem motifs. We prove that the number of non-overlapping irredundant tandems is O(d^2 n) which, considering d as a constant, leads to a linear number of tandems in the length of the input string. This is an order of magnitude less than previously developed compact indexes for tandem extraction. As a further contribution we show an algorithm to extract this compact irredundant index

    Mining, compressing and classifying with extensible motifs

    No full text
    Abstract Background Motif patterns of maximal saturation emerged originally in contexts of pattern discovery in biomolecular sequences and have recently proven a valuable notion also in the design of data compression schemes. Informally, a motif is a string of intermittently solid and wild characters that recurs more or less frequently in an input sequence or family of sequences. Motif discovery techniques and tools tend to be computationally imposing, however, special classes of "rigid" motifs have been identified of which the discovery is affordable in low polynomial time. Results In the present work, "extensible" motifs are considered such that each sequence of gaps comes endowed with some elasticity, whereby the same pattern may be stretched to fit segments of the source that match all the solid characters but are otherwise of different lengths. A few applications of this notion are then described. In applications of data compression by textual substitution, extensible motifs are seen to bring savings on the size of the codebook, and hence to improve compression. In germane contexts, in which compressibility is used in its dual role as a basis for structural inference and classification, extensible motifs are seen to support unsupervised classification and phylogeny reconstruction. Conclusion Off-line compression based on extensible motifs can be used advantageously to compress and classify biological sequences.</p
    corecore