A VOM based gene-finder that specializes in short genes

We present a new approach for gene finding based on a variable-order Markov (VOM) model. The VOM model is a generalization of the traditional Markov model; it is more efficient in terms of its parameterization, and, thus, can be trained on relatively short sequences. As a result, the proposed VOM gene-finder outperforms traditional gene-finders that are based on fifth-order Markov models for short newly sequenced bacterial genomes.