کد مقاله | کد نشریه | سال انتشار | مقاله انگلیسی | نسخه تمام متن |
---|---|---|---|---|
430941 | 688234 | 2007 | 8 صفحه PDF | دانلود رایگان |
Motif discovery is the problem of finding local patterns or motifs from a set of unlabeled sequences. One common representation of a motif is a Markov model known as a score matrix. Matrix based motif discovery has been extensively studied but no positive results have been known regarding its theoretical hardness. We present the first non-trivial upper bound on the complexity (worst-case computation time) of this problem. Other than linear terms, our bound depends only on the motif width w (which is typically 5–20) and is a dramatic improvement relative to previously known bounds. We prove this bound by relating the motif discovery problem to a search problem over permutations of strings of length w, in which the permutations have a particular property. We give a constructive proof of an upper bound on the number of such permutations. For an alphabet size of σ (typically 4) the trivial bound is n!≈(ne)n,n=σw. Our bound is roughly nn(σlogσn)n(σlogσn)n. We relate this theoretical result to the exact motif discovery program, TsukubaBB, whose algorithm contains ideas which inspired the result. We describe a recent improvement to the TsukubaBB program which can give a speed up of nine or more and use a dataset of REB1 transcription factor binding sites to illustrate that exact methods can indeed be used in some practical situations.
Journal: Journal of Discrete Algorithms - Volume 5, Issue 4, December 2007, Pages 706–713