Fluctuation of the Optimal Alignment Score via Monte Carlo

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - 12:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Heinrich Matzinger – Georgia Tech, School of Math
Organizer
Robert Krone
The question of the asymptotic order of magnitude of the fluctuation of the Optimal Alignment Score of two random sequences of length n has been open for decades. We prove a relation between that order and the limit of the rescaled optimal alignment score considered as a function of the substitution matrix. This allows us to determine the asymptotic order of the fluctuation for many realistic situations up to a high confidence level.