Minimal length encoding methods in molecular biology Aleksandar Milosavljevit~

Minimal encoding length (Kolmogorov complexity) is a measure of information content (randomness) the observed data. Algorithmic information theory studies this quantity in great detail (Chaitin 1987; Li & Vit~nyi 1993; Cover & Thomas 1991) and pro-vides a framework for a most general formulation of the principle of parsimony (Occam’s razor). The principle of parsimony has been widely and explicitly used in taxonomy (Sober 1988). Applications have expanded with the appearance of macromolecular sequence data. The minimal edit distance criterion, a special case of the parsimony criterion, has been used for pairwise se-quence alignment (e.g., (Waterman 1989)). The eral principle was often falsely identified with narrow formulations (e.g., the parsimony principle in taxon