Statistical tools for discovering pseudo-periodicities in biological sequences
Many protein sequences present non trivial periodicities, such as cysteine signatures and leucine heptads. These known periodicities probably represent a small percentage of the total number of sequences periodic structures, and it is useful to have general tools to detect such sequences and their period in large databases of sequences. We compare three statistics adapted from those used in time series analysis: a generalisation of the simple autocovariance based on a similarity score and two statistics...