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What is a hidden Markov model ? What is an SVM ?

Wed, 2005-11-02 06:25 — Greg

Sean Eddy answers the first question in a short Nature article. It is a gentle introduction and worth the read if you've heard the words hidden Markov model and been too lazy to make the effort to understand them. Flags n' lollipops has a nice short tutorial on Support Vector Machines that answers the latter.


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Wed, 2005-11-02 11:57 — Neil

great for biology->computing people

HMMs and SVMs are classic examples of methods that have been known and understood by generations of physical/mathematical/computational scientists and are now permeating into biology, where they give most people the heebie jeebies. Myself included. Once you get your head around the word "probabilistic", they make more sense. Sean Eddy's HMMER articles help a lot in using HMMs practically without too much worry over the math; Stew's SVM guide is also very helpful in that regard.