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Software Tool Could Provide Answers to Some of Life's Most Intriguing Questions


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The tool could answer questions such as how many different species exist on Earth and in the oceans.

University of Waterloo researchers have developed a software tool that purportedly can provide conclusive answers to some of the worlds most fascinating questions.

Credit: University of Waterloo News

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have developed a software tool that combines machine learning with digital signal processing (ML-DSP) to make it possible to definitively answer challenging questions.

ML-DSP is an alignment-free software tool that works by transforming a DNA sequence into a digital signal, then uses digital signal processing methods to process and distinguish these signals from each other.

The researchers performed a quantitative comparison with other state-of-the-art classification software tools on two small benchmark datasets and one large 4,322 vertebrate mitochondrial genome dataset. The results showed that ML-DSP outperformed alignment-based software in terms of processing time, while being comparable in terms of classification accuracy.

The researchers also conducted preliminary experiments indicating the potential of ML-DSP to be used for other datasets, by classifying 4,271 complete dengue virus genomes into subtypes with 100% accuracy, and 4,710 bacterial genomes into divisions with 95.5% accuracy.

From University of Waterloo News
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA


 

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