15,780 research outputs found
The similarity metric
A new class of distances appropriate for measuring similarity relations
between sequences, say one type of similarity per distance, is studied. We
propose a new ``normalized information distance'', based on the noncomputable
notion of Kolmogorov complexity, and show that it is in this class and it
minorizes every computable distance in the class (that is, it is universal in
that it discovers all computable similarities). We demonstrate that it is a
metric and call it the {\em similarity metric}. This theory forms the
foundation for a new practical tool. To evidence generality and robustness we
give two distinctive applications in widely divergent areas using standard
compression programs like gzip and GenCompress. First, we compare whole
mitochondrial genomes and infer their evolutionary history. This results in a
first completely automatic computed whole mitochondrial phylogeny tree.
Secondly, we fully automatically compute the language tree of 52 different
languages.Comment: 13 pages, LaTex, 5 figures, Part of this work appeared in Proc. 14th
ACM-SIAM Symp. Discrete Algorithms, 2003. This is the final, corrected,
version to appear in IEEE Trans Inform. T
Normalized Information Distance
The normalized information distance is a universal distance measure for
objects of all kinds. It is based on Kolmogorov complexity and thus
uncomputable, but there are ways to utilize it. First, compression algorithms
can be used to approximate the Kolmogorov complexity if the objects have a
string representation. Second, for names and abstract concepts, page count
statistics from the World Wide Web can be used. These practical realizations of
the normalized information distance can then be applied to machine learning
tasks, expecially clustering, to perform feature-free and parameter-free data
mining. This chapter discusses the theoretical foundations of the normalized
information distance and both practical realizations. It presents numerous
examples of successful real-world applications based on these distance
measures, ranging from bioinformatics to music clustering to machine
translation.Comment: 33 pages, 12 figures, pdf, in: Normalized information distance, in:
Information Theory and Statistical Learning, Eds. M. Dehmer, F.
Emmert-Streib, Springer-Verlag, New-York, To appea
A high-reproducibility and high-accuracy method for automated topic classification
Much of human knowledge sits in large databases of unstructured text.
Leveraging this knowledge requires algorithms that extract and record metadata
on unstructured text documents. Assigning topics to documents will enable
intelligent search, statistical characterization, and meaningful
classification. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is the state-of-the-art in
topic classification. Here, we perform a systematic theoretical and numerical
analysis that demonstrates that current optimization techniques for LDA often
yield results which are not accurate in inferring the most suitable model
parameters. Adapting approaches for community detection in networks, we propose
a new algorithm which displays high-reproducibility and high-accuracy, and also
has high computational efficiency. We apply it to a large set of documents in
the English Wikipedia and reveal its hierarchical structure. Our algorithm
promises to make "big data" text analysis systems more reliable.Comment: 23 pages, 24 figure
An Introduction to Programming for Bioscientists: A Python-based Primer
Computing has revolutionized the biological sciences over the past several
decades, such that virtually all contemporary research in the biosciences
utilizes computer programs. The computational advances have come on many
fronts, spurred by fundamental developments in hardware, software, and
algorithms. These advances have influenced, and even engendered, a phenomenal
array of bioscience fields, including molecular evolution and bioinformatics;
genome-, proteome-, transcriptome- and metabolome-wide experimental studies;
structural genomics; and atomistic simulations of cellular-scale molecular
assemblies as large as ribosomes and intact viruses. In short, much of
post-genomic biology is increasingly becoming a form of computational biology.
The ability to design and write computer programs is among the most
indispensable skills that a modern researcher can cultivate. Python has become
a popular programming language in the biosciences, largely because (i) its
straightforward semantics and clean syntax make it a readily accessible first
language; (ii) it is expressive and well-suited to object-oriented programming,
as well as other modern paradigms; and (iii) the many available libraries and
third-party toolkits extend the functionality of the core language into
virtually every biological domain (sequence and structure analyses,
phylogenomics, workflow management systems, etc.). This primer offers a basic
introduction to coding, via Python, and it includes concrete examples and
exercises to illustrate the language's usage and capabilities; the main text
culminates with a final project in structural bioinformatics. A suite of
Supplemental Chapters is also provided. Starting with basic concepts, such as
that of a 'variable', the Chapters methodically advance the reader to the point
of writing a graphical user interface to compute the Hamming distance between
two DNA sequences.Comment: 65 pages total, including 45 pages text, 3 figures, 4 tables,
numerous exercises, and 19 pages of Supporting Information; currently in
press at PLOS Computational Biolog
Knowledge Rich Natural Language Queries over Structured Biological Databases
Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for
information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases
such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their
popularity are undeniable for obvious reasons, their engineering is far from
simple. In most part, semantics and intent preserving mapping of a well
understood natural language query expressed over a structured database schema
to a structured query language is still a difficult task, and research to tame
the complexity is intense. In this paper, we propose a multi-level
knowledge-based middleware to facilitate such mappings that separate the
conceptual level from the physical level. We augment these multi-level
abstractions with a concept reasoner and a query strategy engine to dynamically
link arbitrary natural language querying to well defined structured queries. We
demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting a Datalog based
prototype system, called BioSmart, that can compute responses to arbitrary
natural language queries over arbitrary databases once a syntactic
classification of the natural language query is made
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