English

Statistical Analysis of Hairpins and BasePairs in RNA Secondary Structures

Combinatorics 2026-02-24 v1 Symbolic Computation

Abstract

We derive precise asymptotic expressions for the expectations, variances, covariance, and quite a few further mixed moments for the number of hairpins and the number of basepairs in RNA secondary structures, and give convincing evidence that the central-scaled distribution of the pair of random variables (hairpins, basepairs) tends in distribution to the bi-variate normal distribution with correlation 5511/2=0.2123322205\sqrt{5 \sqrt{5} -11}/2= 0.2123322205\dots

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.19255,
  title  = {Statistical Analysis of Hairpins and BasePairs in RNA Secondary Structures},
  author = {AJ Bu and Manuel Kauers and Doron Zeilberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19255},
  year   = {2026}
}