Automatic Identification of SARS Coronavirus using Compression-Complexity Measures

Karthi Balasubramanian; Nithin Nagaraj

To highlight the effect of segment length on distinguishing SARS-CoV-1 virsues from SARS-CoV-2 virus, we plot the pairwise distances (both LZ and ETC measures) for the three viruses for a single randomly chosen contiguous segment of length 5000 bases in Figure 5 (left) and for another single randomly chosen contiguous segment of length 25 bases in Figure 5 (right). It is evident that only ETC based measure is able to yield the least distance between the two SARS-CoV-1 pair of viruses for both lengths. LZ based distance measure fails to identify this pair for the short length segment and instead yields the least distance for the pair SARS-CoV-2 and Urbani which is not desirable.