Unsupervised learning of Arabic non-concatenative morphology

Unsupervised approaches to learning the morphology of a language play an important role in computer processing of language from a practical and theoretical perspective, due their minimal reliance on manually produced linguistic resources and human annotation. Such approaches have been widely researched for the problem of concatenative affixation, but less attention has been paid to the intercalated (non-concatenative) morphology exhibited by Arabic and other Semitic languages. The aim of this research is to learn the root and pattern morphology of Arabic, with accuracy comparable to manually built morphological analysis systems. The approach is kept free from human supervision or manual parameter settings, assuming only that roots and patterns intertwine to form a word. Promising results were obtained by applying a technique adapted from previous work in concatenative morphology learning, which uses machine learning to determine relatedness between words. The output, with probabilistic relatedness values between words, was then used to rank all possible roots and patterns to form a lexicon. Analysis using trilateral roots resulted in correct root identification accuracy of approximately 86% for inflected words. Although the machine learning-based approach is effective, it is conceptually complex. So an alternative, simpler and computationally efficient approach was then devised to obtain morpheme scores based on comparative counts of roots and patterns. In this approach, root and pattern scores are defined in terms of each other in a mutually recursive relationship, converging to an optimized morpheme ranking. This technique gives slightly better accuracy while being conceptually simpler and more efficient. The approach, after further enhancements, was evaluated on a version of the Quranic Arabic Corpus, attaining a final accuracy of approximately 93%. A comparative evaluation shows this to be superior to two existing, well used manually built Arabic stemmers, thus demonstrating the practical feasibility of unsupervised learning of non-concatenative morphology

Mottle: Accurate pairwise substitution distance at high divergence through the exploitation of short-read mappers and gradient descent

Current tools for estimating the substitution distance between two related sequences struggle to remain accurate at a high divergence. Difficulties at distant homologies, such as false seeding and over-alignment, create a high barrier for the development of a stable estimator. This is especially true for viral genomes, which carry a high rate of mutation, small size, and sparse taxonomy. Developing an accurate substitution distance measure would help to elucidate the relationship between highly divergent sequences, interrogate their evolutionary history, and better facilitate the discovery of new viral genomes. To tackle these problems, we propose an approach that uses short-read mappers to create whole-genome maps, and gradient descent to isolate the homologous fraction and calculate the final distance value. We implement this approach as Mottle. With the use of simulated and biological sequences, Mottle was able to remain stable to 0.66–0.96 substitutions per base pair and identify viral outgroup genomes with 95% accuracy at the family-order level. Our results indicate that Mottle performs as well as existing programs in identifying taxonomic relationships, with more accurate numerical estimation of genomic distance over greater divergences. By contrast, one limitation is a reduced numerical accuracy at low divergences, and on genomes where insertions and deletions are uncommon, when compared to alternative approaches. We propose that Mottle may therefore be of particular interest in the study of viruses, viral relationships, and notably for viral discovery platforms, helping in benchmarking of homology search tools and defining the limits of taxonomic classification methods. The code for Mottle is available at https://github.com/tphoward/Mottle_Repo

Combinatorial and Probabilistic Approaches to Motif Recognition

Short substrings of genomic data that are responsible for biological processes, such as gene expression, are referred to as motifs. Motifs with the same function may not entirely match, due to mutation events at a few of the motif positions. Allowing for non-exact occurrences significantly complicates their discovery. Given a number of DNA strings, the motif recognition problem is the task of detecting motif instances in every given sequence without knowledge of the position of the instances or the pattern shared by these substrings. We describe a novel approach to motif recognition, and provide theoretical and experimental results that demonstrate its efficiency and accuracy. Our algorithm, MCL-WMR, builds an edge-weighted graph model of the given motif recognition problem and uses a graph clustering algorithm to quickly determine important subgraphs that need to be searched further for valid motifs. By considering a weighted graph model, we narrow the search dramatically to smaller problems that can be solved with significantly less computation. The Closest String problem is a subproblem of motif recognition, and it is NP-hard. We give a linear-time algorithm for a restricted version of the Closest String problem, and an efficient polynomial-time heuristic that solves the general problem with high probability. We initiate the study of the smoothed complexity of the Closest String problem, which in turn explains our empirical results that demonstrate the great capability of our probabilistic heuristic. Important to this analysis is the introduction of a perturbation model of the Closest String instances within which we provide a probabilistic analysis of our algorithm. The smoothed analysis suggests reasons why a well-known fixed parameter tractable algorithm solves Closest String instances extremely efficiently in practice. Although the Closest String model is robust to the oversampling of strings in the input, it is severely affected by the existence of outliers. We propose a refined model, the Closest String with Outliers problem, to overcome this limitation. A systematic parameterized complexity analysis accompanies the introduction of this problem, providing a surprising insight into the sensitivity of this problem to slightly different parameterizations. Through the application of probabilistic and combinatorial insights into the Closest String problem, we develop sMCL-WMR, a program that is much faster than its predecessor MCL-WMR. We apply and adapt sMCL-WMR and MCL-WMR to analyze the promoter regions of the canola seed-coat. Our results identify important regions of the canola genome that are responsible for specific biological activities. This knowledge may be used in the long-term aim of developing crop varieties with specific biological characteristics, such as being disease-resistant

Integrated multiple sequence alignment

Sammeth M. Integrated multiple sequence alignment. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2005.The thesis presents enhancements for automated and manual multiple sequence alignment: existing alignment algorithms are made more easily accessible and new algorithms are designed for difficult cases. Firstly, we introduce the QAlign framework, a graphical user interface for multiple sequence alignment. It comprises several state-of-the-art algorithms and supports their parameters by convenient dialogs. An alignment viewer with guided editing functionality can also highlight or print regions of the alignment. Also phylogenetic features are provided, e.g., distance-based tree reconstruction methods, corrections for multiple substitutions and a tree viewer. The modular concept and the platform-independent implementation guarantee an easy extensibility. Further, we develop a constrained version of the divide-and-conquer alignment such that it can be restricted by anchors found earlier with local alignments. It can be shown that this method shares attributes of both, local and global aligners, in the quality of results as well as in the computation time. We further modify the local alignment step to work on bipartite (or even multipartite) sets for sequences where repeats overshadow valuable sequence information. In the end a technique is established that can accurately align sequences containing eventually repeated motifs. Finally, another algorithm is presented that allows to compare tandem repeat sequences by aligning them with respect to their possible repeat histories. We describe an evolutionary model including tandem duplications and excisions, and give an exact algorithm to compare two sequences under this model

Constraint based method for finding motifs in DNA sequences

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Integration of Alignment and Phylogeny in the Whole-Genome Era

With the development of new sequencing techniques, whole genomes of many species have become available. This huge amount of data gives rise to new opportunities and challenges. These new sequences provide valuable information on relationships among species, e.g. genome recombination and conservation. One of the principal ways to investigate such information is multiple sequence alignment (MSA). Currently, there is large amount of MSA data on the internet, such as the UCSC genome database, but how to effectively use this information to solve classical and new problems is still an area lacking of exploration. In this thesis, we explored how to use this information in four problems, i.e. sequence orthology search problem, multiple alignment improvement problem, short read mapping problem, and genome rearrangement inference problem. For the first problem, we developed a EM algorithm to iteratively align a query with a multiple alignment database with the information from a phylogeny relating the query species and the species in the multiple alignment. We also infer the query\u27s location in the phylogeny. We showed that by doing alignment and phylogeny inference together, we can improve the accuracies for both problems. For the second problem, we developed an optimization algorithm to iteratively refine the multiple alignment quality. Experiment results showed our algorithm is very stable in term of resulting alignments. The results showed that our method is more accurate than existing methods, i.e. Mafft, Clustal-O, and Mavid, on test data from three sets of species from the UCSC genome database. For the third problem, we developed a model, PhyMap, to align a read to a multiple alignment allowing mismatches and indels. PhyMap computes local alignments of a query sequence against a fixed multiple-genome alignment of closely related species. PhyMap uses a known phylogenetic tree on the species in the multiple alignment to improve the quality of its computed alignments while also estimating the placement of the query on this tree. Both theoretical computation and experiment results show that our model can differentiate between orthologous and paralogous alignments better than other popular short read mapping tools (BWA, BOWTIE and BLAST). For the fourth problem, we gave a simple genome recombination model which can express insertions, deletions, inversions, translocations and inverted translocations on aligned genome segments. We also developed an MCMC algorithm to infer the order of the query segments. We proved that using any Euclidian metrics to measure distance between two sequence orders in the tree optimization goal function will lead to a degenerated solution where the inferred order will be the order of one of the leaf nodes. We also gave a graph-based formulation of the problem which can represent the probability distribution of the order of the query sequences

Genome Informatics for High-Throughput Sequencing Data Analysis: Methods and Applications

This thesis introduces three different algorithmical and statistical strategies for the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data. First, we introduce a heuristic method based on enhanced suffix arrays to map short sequences to larger reference genomes. The algorithm builds on the idea of an error-tolerant traversal of the suffix array for the reference genome in conjunction with the concept of matching statistics introduced by Chang and a bitvector based alignment algorithm proposed by Myers. The algorithm supports paired-end and mate-pair alignments and the implementation offers methods for primer detection, primer and poly-A trimming. In our own benchmarks as well as independent bench- marks this tool outcompetes other currently available tools with respect to sensitivity and specificity in simulated and real data sets for a large number of sequencing protocols. Second, we introduce a novel dynamic programming algorithm for the spliced alignment problem. The advantage of this algorithm is its capability to not only detect co-linear splice events, i.e. local splice events on the same genomic strand, but also circular and other non-collinear splice events. This succinct and simple algorithm handles all these cases at the same time with a high accuracy. While it is at par with other state- of-the-art methods for collinear splice events, it outcompetes other tools for many non-collinear splice events. The application of this method to publically available sequencing data led to the identification of a novel isoform of the tumor suppressor gene p53. Since this gene is one of the best studied genes in the human genome, this finding is quite remarkable and suggests that the application of our algorithm could help to identify a plethora of novel isoforms and genes. Third, we present a data adaptive method to call single nucleotide variations (SNVs) from aligned high-throughput sequencing reads. We demonstrate that our method based on empirical log-likelihoods automatically adjusts to the quality of a sequencing experiment and thus renders a \"decision\" on when to call an SNV. In our simulations this method is at par with current state-of-the-art tools. Finally, we present biological results that have been obtained using the special features of the presented alignment algorithm.Diese Arbeit stellt drei verschiedene algorithmische und statistische Strategien für die Analyse von Hochdurchsatz-Sequenzierungsdaten vor. Zuerst führen wir eine auf enhanced Suffixarrays basierende heuristische Methode ein, die kurze Sequenzen mit grossen Genomen aligniert. Die Methode basiert auf der Idee einer fehlertoleranten Traversierung eines Suffixarrays für Referenzgenome in Verbindung mit dem Konzept der Matching-Statistik von Chang und einem auf Bitvektoren basierenden Alignmentalgorithmus von Myers. Die vorgestellte Methode unterstützt Paired-End und Mate-Pair Alignments, bietet Methoden zur Erkennung von Primersequenzen und zum trimmen von Poly-A-Signalen an. Auch in unabhängigen Benchmarks zeichnet sich das Verfahren durch hohe Sensitivität und Spezifität in simulierten und realen Datensätzen aus. Für eine große Anzahl von Sequenzierungsprotokollen erzielt es bessere Ergebnisse als andere bekannte Short-Read Alignmentprogramme. Zweitens stellen wir einen auf dynamischer Programmierung basierenden Algorithmus für das spliced alignment problem vor. Der Vorteil dieses Algorithmus ist seine Fähigkeit, nicht nur kollineare Spleiß- Ereignisse, d.h. Spleiß-Ereignisse auf dem gleichen genomischen Strang, sondern auch zirkuläre und andere nicht-kollineare Spleiß-Ereignisse zu identifizieren. Das Verfahren zeichnet sich durch eine hohe Genauigkeit aus: während es bei der Erkennung kollinearer Spleiß-Varianten vergleichbare Ergebnisse mit anderen Methoden erzielt, schlägt es die Wettbewerber mit Blick auf Sensitivität und Spezifität bei der Vorhersage nicht-kollinearer Spleißvarianten. Die Anwendung dieses Algorithmus führte zur Identifikation neuer Isoformen. In unserer Publikation berichten wir über eine neue Isoform des Tumorsuppressorgens p53. Da dieses Gen eines der am besten untersuchten Gene des menschlichen Genoms ist, könnte die Anwendung unseres Algorithmus helfen, eine Vielzahl weiterer Isoformen bei weniger prominenten Genen zu identifizieren. Drittens stellen wir ein datenadaptives Modell zur Identifikation von Single Nucleotide Variations (SNVs) vor. In unserer Arbeit zeigen wir, dass sich unser auf empirischen log-likelihoods basierendes Modell automatisch an die Qualität der Sequenzierungsexperimente anpasst und eine \"Entscheidung\" darüber trifft, welche potentiellen Variationen als SNVs zu klassifizieren sind. In unseren Simulationen ist diese Methode auf Augenhöhe mit aktuell eingesetzten Verfahren. Schließlich stellen wir eine Auswahl biologischer Ergebnisse vor, die mit den Besonderheiten der präsentierten Alignmentverfahren in Zusammenhang stehen

USING THE MULTI-STRING BURROW-WHEELER TRANSFORM FOR HIGH-THROUGHPUT SEQUENCE ANALYSIS

The throughput of sequencing technologies has created a bottleneck where raw sequence files are stored in an un-indexed format on disk. Alignment to a reference genome is the most common pre-processing method for indexing this data, but alignment requires a priori knowledge of a reference sequence, and often loses a significant amount of sequencing data due to biases. Sequencing data can instead be stored in a lossless, compressed, indexed format using the multi-string Burrows Wheeler Transform (BWT). This dissertation introduces three algorithms that enable faster construction of the BWT for sequencing datasets. The first two algorithms are a merge algorithm for merging two or more BWTs into a single BWT and a merge-based divide-and-conquer algorithm that will construct a BWT from any sequencing dataset. The third algorithm is an induced sorting algorithm that constructs the BWT from any string collection and is well-suited for building BWTs of long-read sequencing datasets. These algorithms are evaluated based on their efficiency and utility in constructing BWTs of different types of sequencing data. This dissertation also introduces two applications of the BWT: long-read error correction and a set of biologically motivated sequence search tools. The long-read error correction is evaluated based on accuracy and efficiency of the correction. Our analyses show that the BWT of almost all sequencing datasets can now be efficiently constructed. Once constructed, we show that the BWT offers significant utility in performing fast searches as well as fast and accurate long read corrections. Additionally, we highlight several use cases of the BWT-based web tools in answering biologically mo- tivated problems.Doctor of Philosoph