Detecting salient changes in genomic signals

Abstract

The functional state of an organism is determined largely by the pattern of expression of its genes. Salient changes in variation in expression of genes can give clues about important events, such as the onset of a disease. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting salient inflection points in genomic signals. These are detected using a scale-space decomposition, to be the negative-going zero-crossings of the second derivative of smoothed signal that are preserved over an automatically selected scale. The utility of salient change detection is demonstrated in the automatic identification of regulatory phase for genes active in the mitotic cell cyle of budding yeast.