“…In the past two decades, we have witnessed the development of the likelihood approach to pairwise sequence alignments (Bishop and Thompson, 1986;Thorne et al, 1991); probabilistic models for RNA secondary structure predictions (Zuker, 1989;Lowe and Eddy, 1997;Ding and Lawrence, 2001;Pedersen et al, 2004); the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for finding regulatory binding motifs (Lawrence and Reilly, 1990;Cardon and Stormo, 1992), the Gibbs sampling strategies for detecting subtle sequence similarities (Lawrence et al, 1993;Liu, 1994;Neuwald et al, 1997); the hidden Markov models (HMMs) for DNA composition analysis, multiple sequence alignments, gene prediction, and protein secondary structure prediction (Churchill, 1989;Krogh et al, 1994a;Baldi et al, 1994;Burge and Karlin, 1997;Schmidler et al, 2000; Chapters 4 and 5); regression and Bayesian network approaches to gene regulation networks (Bussemaker et al, 2001;Segal et al, 2003;Conlon et al, 2003;Beer and Tavazoie, 2004;Zhong et al, 2005); and many statistical-model based approaches to gene expression microarray analyses (Li and Wong, 2001;Lu et al, 2004;Speed, 2003). All these developments show that algorithms resulting from statistical modeling efforts constitute a significant portion of today's bioinformatics toolbox.…”