English

RNA secondary structures: from ab initio prediction to better compression, and back

Biomolecules 2023-02-24 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

In this paper, we use the biological domain knowledge incorporated into stochastic models for ab initio RNA secondary-structure prediction to improve the state of the art in joint compression of RNA sequence and structure data (Liu et al., BMC Bioinformatics, 2008). Moreover, we show that, conversely, compression ratio can serve as a cheap and robust proxy for comparing the prediction quality of different stochastic models, which may help guide the search for better RNA structure prediction models. Our results build on expert stochastic context-free grammar models of RNA secondary structures (Dowell & Eddy, BMC Bioinformatics, 2004; Nebel & Scheid, Theory in Biosciences, 2011) combined with different (static and adaptive) models for rule probabilities and arithmetic coding. We provide a prototype implementation and an extensive empirical evaluation, where we illustrate how grammar features and probability models affect compression ratios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.11669,
  title  = {RNA secondary structures: from ab initio prediction to better compression, and back},
  author = {Evarista Onokpasa and Sebastian Wild and Prudence W. H. Wong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.11669},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

paper at Data Compression Conference 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:47:23.315Z