| Summary: | <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>We propose a sequence clustering algorithm and compare the partition quality and execution time of the proposed algorithm with those of a popular existing algorithm. The proposed clustering algorithm uses a grammar-based distance metric to determine partitioning for a set of biological sequences. The algorithm performs clustering in which new sequences are compared with cluster-representative sequences to determine membership. If comparison fails to identify a suitable cluster, a new cluster is created.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated via comparison to the popular DNA/RNA sequence clustering approach, CD-HIT-EST, and to the recently developed algorithm, UCLUST, using two different sets of 16S rDNA sequences from 2,255 genera. The proposed algorithm maintains a comparable CPU execution time with that of CD-HIT-EST which is much slower than UCLUST, and has successfully generated clusters with higher statistical accuracy than both CD-HIT-EST and UCLUST. The validation results are especially striking for large datasets.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We introduce a fast and accurate clustering algorithm that relies on a grammar-based sequence distance. Its statistical clustering quality is validated by clustering large datasets containing 16S rDNA sequences.</p>
|
|---|
