Novel Combinatorial and Information Theoretic Alignment Free Distances for Biological Data Mining

Abstract

Among the plethora of alignment-free methods for comparing biological sequences, there are some that we have perceived as representative of the novel techniques that have been devised in the past few years and as being of a fundamental nature and of broad interest and applicability, ranging from combinatorics to information theory. In this chapter, we review these alignment free methods, by presenting both their mathematical definitions and the experiments in which they are involved in.