Probabilistic Models of k-mer Frequencies (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

In this article, we review existing probabilistic models for modeling abundance of fixed-length strings (k-mers) in DNA sequencing data. These models capture dependence of the abundance on various phenomena, such as the size and repeat content of the genome, heterozygosity levels, and sequencing error rate. This in turn allows to estimate these properties from k-mer abundance histograms observed in real data. We also briefly discuss the issue of comparing k-mer abundance between related sequencing samples and meaningfully summarizing the results.