Limiting distribution of the number of clumps of palindromes in DNA

Abstract

ABSTRACTAn important aspect in the analysis of long DNA sequences is to identify whether palindromes are over- or under-represented. The essential step in that direction is the analysis of the limiting distribution of the number of clumps of palindromes where clump is defined as the overlapping occurrence of palindromes. Using the Chen–Stein method, it is shown in this paper that the limiting distribution, under suitable conditions and a type of heterogeneous sequence, is the Poisson distribution. Moreover, error bounds and the rate of convergence are derived in terms of total variation distance between two probability distributions.