Counting, generating and sampling tree alignments

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Pairwise ordered tree alignment are combinatorial objects that appear in RNA secondary structure comparison. However, the usual representation of tree alignments as supertrees is ambiguous, i.e. two distinct supertrees may induce identical sets of matches between identical pairs of trees. This ambiguity is uninformative, and detrimental to any probabilistic analysis. In this work, we consider tree alignments up to equivalence. Our first result is a precise asymptotic enumeration of tree alignments, obtained from a context-free grammar by means of basic analytic combinatorics. Our second result focuses on alignments between two given ordered trees. By refining our grammar to align specific trees, we obtain a decomposition scheme for the space of alignments, and use it to design an efficient dynamic programming algorithm for sampling alignments under the Gibbs-Boltzmann probability distribution. This generalizes existing tree alignment algorithms, and opens the door for a probabilistic analysis of the space of suboptimal RNA secondary structures alignments.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAlgorithms for Computational Biology - 3rd International Conference, AlCoB 2016, Proceedings
EditorsMiguel A. Vega-Rodríguez, Sergio Santander-Jiménez, María Botón-Fernández, Carlos Martín-Vide
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages53-64
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9783319388267
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2016
Event3rd International Conference on Algorithms for Computational Biology, AlCoB 2016 - Trujillo, Spain
Duration: 21 Jun 201622 Jun 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9702
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference3rd International Conference on Algorithms for Computational Biology, AlCoB 2016
Country/TerritorySpain
CityTrujillo
Period21/06/1622/06/16

Keywords

  • Dynamic programming
  • RNA secondary structure
  • Tree alignment

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