A cooperative strategy dedicated to structured motif discovery in genomic data

International audienceThe stochastic method Kaos is an ad hoc construction in the line of metaheuristics designed to cope with the problem of structured motif discovery in a set of DNA sequences. Our contributions are: (1) the statement of a problem exceptionally formalized in the framework of operational research; (2) the design of an approach whose genuine novelty rests on driving the search by the (unknown) structure of the motif; (3) an analysis for establishing the soundness of the method including an original graphical evaluation of the risks to uncover false positive solutions; (4) the implementation of an accurate and robust tool well adapted to data mining (only 3 input parameters required). Therefore we contribute to bring knowledge about the accuracy and robustness of stochastic methods w.r.t. the hard and peculiar problem of biological sequence comparison