BTW: A web server for Boltzmann time warping for gene expression time series

Dynamic time warping ( DTW) is a well- known quadratic time algorithm to determine the smallest distance and optimal alignment between two numerical sequences, possibly of different length. Originally developed for speech recognition, this method has been used in data mining, medicine and bioinformatics. For gene expression time series data, time warping distance is arguably a more flexible tool to determine genes having similar temporal expression, hence possibly related biological function, than either Euclidean distance or correlation coefficient especially since time warping accommodates sequences of different length. The BTW web server allows a user to upload two tab- separated text files A, B of gene expression data, each possibly having a different number of time intervals of different durations. BTW then computes time warping distance between each gene of A with each gene of B, using a recently developed symmetric algorithm which additionally computes the Boltzmann partition function and outputs Boltzmann pair probabilities. The Boltzmann pair probabilities, not available with any other existent software, suggest possible biological significance of certain positions in an optimal time warping alignment. Availability: http://bioinformatics.bc.edu/clotelab/BTW/