  We introduce and study a set of training-free methods of
information-theoretic and algorithmic complexity nature applied to DNA
sequences to identify their potential capabilities to determine nucleosomal
binding sites. We test our measures on well-studied genomic sequences of
different sizes drawn from different sources. The measures reveal the known in
vivo versus in vitro predictive discrepancies and uncover their potential to
pinpoint (high) nucleosome occupancy. We explore different possible signals
within and beyond the nucleosome length and find that complexity indices are
informative of nucleosome occupancy. We compare against the gold standard
(Kaplan model) and find similar and complementary results with the main
difference that our sequence complexity approach. For example, for high
occupancy, complexity-based scores outperform the Kaplan model for predicting
binding representing a significant advancement in predicting the highest
nucleosome occupancy following a training-free approach.
