Abstract

We present a complete analysis of the statistics of number of occurrences of a regular expression pattern in a random text. This covers "motifs" widely used in computational biology. Our approach is based on: (i) a constructive approach to classical results in theoretical computer science (automata and formal language theory), in particular, the rationality of generating functions of regular languages; (ii) analytic combinatorics that is used for deriving asymptotic properties from generating functions; (iii) computer algebra for determining generating functions explicitly, analysing generating functions and extracting coefficients efficiently. We provide constructions for overlapping or non-overlapping matches of a regular expression. A companion implementation produces multivariate generating functions for the statistics under study. A fast computation of Taylor coefficients of the generating functions then yields exact values of the moments with typical application to random t...

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