Change Trees and Mutagrams for the Visualization of Local Changes in Sequence Data

Abstract

The analysis of local changes in sequence data is of interest for various applications such as the segmentation of DNA and other genetic sequences, or financial data sequences. Patterns of change that can be characterized as local jump change or slope change are of special interest. We propose simple graphical tools to visualize such patterns of local change. The concept of mode trees—developed for the visualization of local patterns in densities—is adapted to visualize patterns of local change in dependency on a threshold parameter by means of a change tree . The simultaneous visualization of scale effects, in analogy to SiZer, motivates another graphical device, the mutagram . We illustrate these concepts with several sets of sequence data.

Key Words:

• Biological sequence data
• Dna sequence
• Jump discontinuity
• Nonparametric segmentation
• Scaling
• Slope change