We address in this paper a new computational biology problem that aims at understanding a mechanism that could potentially be used to genetically manipulate natural insect populations infected by inherited, intra-cellular parasitic bacteria. In this problem, that we denote by \textsc{Mod/Resc Parsimony Inference}, we are given a boolean matrix and the goal is to find two other boolean matrices with a minimum number of columns such that an appropriately defined operation on these matrices gives back the input. We show that this is formally equivalent to the \textsc{Bipartite Biclique Edge Cover} problem and derive some complexity results for our problem using this equivalence. We provide a new, fixed-parameter tractability approach for solving both that slightly improves upon a previously published algorithm for the \textsc{Bipartite Biclique Edge Cover}. Finally, we present experimental results where we applied some of our techniques to a real-life data set.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1002.1292,
title = {Mod/Resc Parsimony Inference},
author = {Igor Nor and Danny Hermelin and Sylvain Charlat and Jan Engelstadter and Max Reuter and Olivier Duron and Marie-France Sagot},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1002.1292},
year = {2015}
}