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Estimators for Substitution Rates in Genomes from Read Data

Published: January 12, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.07546v1

By: Shiv Pratap Singh Rathore, Navin Kashyap

We study the problem of estimating the mutation rate between two sequences from noisy sequencing reads. Existing alignment-free methods typically assume direct access to the full sequences. We extend these methods to the sequencing framework, where only noisy reads from the sequences are observed. We use a simple model in which both mutations and sequencing errors are substitutions. We propose multiple estimators, provide theoretical guarantees for one of them, and evaluate the others through simulations.

Category
Computer Science:
Information Theory