title: Branch and bound computation of exact p-values.
abstract: P-value computation is often used in bioinformatics to quantify the surprise, or significance, associated with a given observation. An implementation is provided that computes the exact p-value associated with any observed sample, against a null multinomial distribution, using the likelihood-ratio statistic. The efficient branch and bound code, far exceeding the full enumeration implemented by commercial packages, is especially useful with small sample, sparse data and rare events, common scenarios in bioinformatics, where approximations are often inaccurate and inappropriate. This code base can also be adapted to compute exact p-values of other statistics in diverse sampling scenarios.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Freely available at http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~jill/src/.
authors.affiliation: Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, 1156 High Street, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. jill@soe.ucsc.edujill
authors.forename: Gill
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Bejerano
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D017421:Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods*