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Consensus functions and patterns in molecular sequences

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Abstract

In recent years, methods of consensus, developed for the solution of problems in the social sciences, have become widely used in molecular biology. Westudy a method of consensus originally due to Watermanet al. (Waterman, Galas and Arratia. 1984. Pattern recognition in several sequences: consensus and alignment.Bull. math. Biol. 46, 515–527) which is used to identify patterns or features in a molecular sequence where a pattern can vary in position within a given window. We show that some well-known consensus methods of the social sciences, the median and the mean, are special cases of this method for certain choices of the parameters used in it and give a precise account of the parameters for which these special cases arise. We also show that the specific parameters used in the method of Watermanet al. make their method equivalent to the median procedure which is widely used in the social sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics and Applied Statistics, Central Economics-Mathematics Institute, Krasikova 32, 117418, Moscow, Russia

    Boris Mirkin

  2. Department of Mathematics and Center for Operations Research, Rutgers University, 08903, New Brunswick, NJ, U.S.A.

    Fred S. Roberts

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  1. Boris Mirkin
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  2. Fred S. Roberts
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Mirkin, B., Roberts, F.S. Consensus functions and patterns in molecular sequences. Bltn Mathcal Biology 55, 695–713 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02460669

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02460669

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