A statistical fat-tail test of predicting regulatory regions in the Drosophila genome

A statistical study of cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) is presented based on the estimation of similar-word set distribution. It is observed that CRMs tend to have a fat-tail distribution. A new statistical fat-tail test with two kurtosis-based fatness coefficients is proposed to distinguish CRMs from non-CRMs. As compared with the existing fluffy-tail test, the first fatness coefficient is designed to reduce computational time, making the novel fat-tail test very suitable for long sequences and large database analysis in the post-genome time and the second one to improve separation accuracy between CRMs and non-CRMs. These two fatness coefficients may serve as valuable filtering indexes to predict CRMs experimentally.