Quantitative linguistic study of DNA sequences

Abstract

A new family of compound Poisson distribution functions from quantitative linguistics is used to study the linguistic features of DNA sequences that go beyond the Zipf's law. The relative frequency distribution of n-tuples and the compositional segmentation study can be fit reasonably well using this new family of distribution functions. On the other hand, the absolute values of the relative frequency come out naturally from the linguistic model without ambiguity. It is suggesting that DNA sequences have features that resemble natural language and it may be modeled by linguistic methodology.