On effective classification of strings with wavelets

Abstract

In recent years, the technological advances in mapping genes have made it increasingly easy to store and use a wide variety of biological data. Such data are usually in the form of very long strings for which it is difficult to determine the most relevant features for a classification task. For example, a typical DNA string may be millions of characters long, and there may be thousands of such strings in a database. In many cases, the classification behavior of the data may be hidden in the compositional behavior of certain segments of the string which cannot be easily determined apriori. Another problem which complicates the classification task is that in some cases the classification behavior is reflected in global behavior of the string, whereas in others it is reflected in local patterns. Given the enormous variation in the behavior of the strings over different data sets, it is useful to develop an approach which is sensitive to both the global and local behavior of the strings for the purpose of classification. For this purpose, we will exploit the multi-resolution property of wavelet decomposition in order to create a scheme which can mine classification characteristics at different levels of granularity. The resulting scheme turns out to be very effective in practice on a wide range of problems.