Motif Diversity in Human Liver ChIP-seq Data Using MAP-Elites

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Hauptverfasser: Medina, Alejandro, Benton, Mary Lauren
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Medina, Alejandro
Benton, Mary Lauren
author_facet Medina, Alejandro
Benton, Mary Lauren
contents Motif discovery is a core problem in computational biology, traditionally formulated as a likelihood optimization task that returns a single dominant motif from a DNA sequence dataset. However, regulatory sequence data admit multiple plausible motif explanations, reflecting underlying biological heterogeneity. In this work, we frame motif discovery as a quality-diversity problem and apply the MAP-Elites algorithm to evolve position weight matrix motifs under a likelihood-based fitness objective while explicitly preserving diversity across biologically meaningful dimensions. We evaluate MAP-Elites using three complementary behavioral characterizations that capture trade-offs between motif specificity, compositional structure, coverage, and robustness. Experiments on human CTCF liver ChIP-seq data aligned to the human reference genome compare MAP-Elites against a standard motif discovery tool, MEME, under matched evaluation criteria across stratified dataset subsets. Results show that MAP-Elites recovers multiple high-quality motif variants with fitness comparable to MEME's strongest solutions while revealing structured diversity obscured by single-solution approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17808
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Motif Diversity in Human Liver ChIP-seq Data Using MAP-Elites
Medina, Alejandro
Benton, Mary Lauren
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Genomics
Motif discovery is a core problem in computational biology, traditionally formulated as a likelihood optimization task that returns a single dominant motif from a DNA sequence dataset. However, regulatory sequence data admit multiple plausible motif explanations, reflecting underlying biological heterogeneity. In this work, we frame motif discovery as a quality-diversity problem and apply the MAP-Elites algorithm to evolve position weight matrix motifs under a likelihood-based fitness objective while explicitly preserving diversity across biologically meaningful dimensions. We evaluate MAP-Elites using three complementary behavioral characterizations that capture trade-offs between motif specificity, compositional structure, coverage, and robustness. Experiments on human CTCF liver ChIP-seq data aligned to the human reference genome compare MAP-Elites against a standard motif discovery tool, MEME, under matched evaluation criteria across stratified dataset subsets. Results show that MAP-Elites recovers multiple high-quality motif variants with fitness comparable to MEME's strongest solutions while revealing structured diversity obscured by single-solution approaches.
title Motif Diversity in Human Liver ChIP-seq Data Using MAP-Elites
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Genomics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17808