Abstract
Fractal methods have been successfully used to study many problems in physics, mathematics, engineering, finance and even in biology. There has been an increasing interest in unravelling the mysteries of DNA; for example, how can we distinguish coding and noncoding sequences and the problems of classification and evolution relationship of organisms are key problems in bioinformatics. Although much research has been carried out by taking into consideration the long-range correlations in DNA sequences and the global fractal dimension has been used in these works by other people, the models and methods are somewhat rough and the results are not satisfactory. In recent years, our group has introduced a time series model (statistical point of view) and a visual representation (geometrical point of view) to DNA sequence analysis. We have also used fractal dimension, correlation dimension, the Hurst exponent and the dimension spectrum (multifractal analysis) to discuss problems in this field. In this paper, we introduce these fractal models and methods and the results of DNA sequence analysis.