This book develops a new approach called parameter advising for finding a parameter setting for a sequence aligner that yields a quality alignment of a given set of input sequences. In this framework, a parameter advisor is a procedure that automatically chooses a parameter setting for the input, and has two main ingredients:

(a) the set of parameter choices considered by the advisor, and

(b) an estimator of alignment accuracy used to rank alignments produced by the aligner.

On coupling a parameter advisor with an aligner, once the advisor is trained in a learning phase, the user simply inputs sequences to align, and receives an output alignment from the aligner, where the advisor has automatically selected the parameter setting.

The chapters first lay out the foundations of parameter advising, and then cover applications and extensions of advising. The content