Detection of tandem repeats in DNA sequences based on parametric spectral estimation.

Tandem repeats, which occur frequently in genomes, are related to gene regulatory functions and various diseases. In this paper, an efficient algorithm for tandem repeat detection is proposed. In our method, the spectrogram of a DNA sequence is analyzed based on the autoregressive model. Then, significant peaks in the spectrogram are selected, and the corresponding regions in the DNA sequence are analyzed to search for tandem repeats. Experiment results show that our method has a superior performance in comparison with other algorithms.