Figure 4

Integration of distance profiles. The local distance measure $D_n^{(X)}(B\wedge C_i|B)$ is computed over the entire profile length (genome). Unlike the individual feature probability profiles, the distance profile can be integrated to give rise to a meaningful genome wide distance measure. The proper integrated distance ${\overline{D}}_I^{(X)}$ might involve several genome intervals I = [n₁, n₁ + Δn₁] ∪ [n₂, n₂ + Δn₂] and/or an "infinite" interval [n₃, + ∞[. Obviously, other genome wide measures can be defined for the divergence such as the mean, median, sup, min, etc. Again, the divergence measure need not to be computed over all nucleotides but might be restricted to any combination of non-overlapping intervals I or individual positions n. In this way the global divergence measure computation can be restricted to particular sequence features such as coding regions.