A preliminary investigation of using age and distance measures in the detection of evolutionary couplings

An initial study of using two measures to improve the accuracy of evolutionary couplings uncovered from version history is presented. Two measures, namely the age of a pattern and the distance among items within a pattern, are defined and used with the traditional methods for computing evolutionary couplings. The goal is to reduce the number of false positives (i.e., inaccurate or irrelevant claims of coupling). Initial observations are presented that lend evidence that these measures may have the potential to improve the results of computing evolutionary couplings.