Canal-U

3.8. Probabilistic methods

Up to now, to predict our gene,we only rely on the process of searching certain strings or patterns. In order to further improve our gene predictor, the idea is to use, to rely onprobabilistic methods. What does it mean? I will firsttake an example, which is not related to genomic but I think it'sgood to understand the idea. Imagine you have a very long text which is known to be written in some human understandable language but you don't know which one but you know that some passages of this text only are written in a human understandable language,maybe English, maybe French and so on, whatever. You don't know. How can you retrieve these passages with this very little information you have on the text? Well, the idea is to make use ofthe fact that the frequencies of letters in a human readable languageare different from random frequencies. For example, here you have the tables of the frequencies and letters in French and in English. For example you see in French,W is a very low frequency, the highest frequency is E and so on, yousee E for example, well whatever, the. . . OK. This is also meaningful. OK. But the idea here is you see that if you count the frequencies letters in a human readable text,these frequencies are not all equal. That's normal because it's writtenwith words and so on and so on.