MOTIVATION: High-throughput conformation capture experiments, such as Hi-C provide genome-wide maps of chromatin interactions, enabling life scientists to investigate the role of the three-dimensional structure of genomes in gene regulation and other essential cellular functions. A fundamental problem in the analysis of Hi-C data is how to compare two contact maps derived from Hi-C experiments. Detecting similarities and differences between contact maps are critical in evaluating the reproducibility of replicate experiments and for identifying differential genomic regions with biological significance. Due to the complexity of chromatin conformations and the presence of technology-driven and sequence-specific biases, the comparative analysis of Hi-C data is analytically and computationally challenging. RESULTS: We present a novel method called Selfish for the comparative analysis of Hi-C data that takes advantage of the structural self-similarity in contact maps. We define a novel self-similarity measure to design algorithms for (i) measuring reproducibility for Hi-C replicate experiments and (ii) finding differential chromatin interactions between two contact maps. Extensive experimental results on simulated and real data show that Selfish is more accurate and robust than state-of-the-art methods. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://github.com/ucrbioinfo/Selfish.

Continuous improvements to high-throughput conformation capture (Hi-C) are revealing richerinformation about the spatial organization of the chromatin and its role in cellular functions.Several studies have confirmed the existence of structural features of the genome 3D organiza-tion that are stable across cell types and conserved across species, calledtopological associatingdomains(TADs). The detection of TADs has become a critical step in the analysis of Hi-C data,e.g., to identify enhancer-promoter associations. Here we presentEast, a novel TAD identifi-cation algorithm based on fast 2D convolution of Haar-like features, that is as accurate as thestate-of-the-art method based on the directionality index, but 75-80x faster.Eastis availablein the public domain at https://github.com/ucrbioinfo/EAST.

This paper addresses the problem of gender recognition by proposing a new feature descriptor to be used in classification. The contribution of this work is an extension to the local binary patterns traditionally used as descriptors. Local binary patterns include information about the relationship between a central pixel value and those of its neighboring pixels in a very compact manner. In the proposed method we incorporate into the descriptor more information from the neighborhood by using four predefined patterns, rather than just one, as in the classic model. We evaluate the performance of our method on the standard FERET database by comparing it to existing methods and show that we can extract more discriminative features and subsequently provide better gender recognition accuracy.