Genomic analysis using methods from information theory

Methods used in information theory can be used in genomic analysis to provide a more meaningful insight into the genetic process. Using an information transfer model between certain polymorphisms in the human genome (SNP) and certain diseases (e.g. Alzheimer), Shannon's mutual information can identify the relevant SNP. Several compression algorithms approximating the entropy of DNA sequences are used to distinguish between introns and exons. Certain distance measures derived from DNA sequences allow classification leading to evolutionary trees. They can also be used for content recognition.