Genome wide association studies (GWAS) attempt to map genotypes to phenotypes in organisms. This is typically performed by genotyping individuals using microarray or by aligning whole genome sequencing reads to a reference genome. Both approaches require knowledge of a reference genome which hinders their application to organisms with no or incomplete reference genomes. This caveat can be removed by using alignment-free association mapping methods based on k-mers from sequencing reads. Here we present an improved implementation of an alignment free association mapping method. The new implementation is faster and includes additional features to make it more flexible than the original implementation. We have tested our implementation on an E. Coli ampicillin resistance dataset and observe improvement in execution time over the original implementation while maintaining accuracy in results. We also demonstrate that the method can be applied to find sex specific sequences.
In this work, we have presented a way to increase the contrast of an image. Our target is to find a transformation that will be image specific. We have used a fuzzy system as our transformation function. To tune the system according to an image, we have used Genetic Algorithm and Hill Climbing in multiple ways to evolve the fuzzy system and conducted several experiments. Different variants of the method are tested on several images and two variants that are superior to others in terms of fitness are selected. We have also conducted a survey to assess the visual improvement of the enhancements made by the two variants. The survey indicates that one of the methods can enhance the contrast of the images visually.
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