  Spaced seeds have been recently shown to not only detect more alignments, but
also to give a more accurate measure of phylogenetic distances (Boden et al.,
2013, Horwege et al., 2014, Leimeister et al., 2014), and to provide a lower
misclassification rate when used with Support Vector Machines (SVMs) (On-odera
and Shibuya, 2013), We confirm by independent experiments these two results,
and propose in this article to use a coverage criterion (Benson and Mak, 2008,
Martin, 2013, Martin and No{\'e}, 2014), to measure the seed efficiency in both
cases in order to design better seed patterns. We show first how this coverage
criterion can be directly measured by a full automaton-based approach. We then
illustrate how this criterion performs when compared with two other criteria
frequently used, namely the single-hit and multiple-hit criteria, through
correlation coefficients with the correct classification/the true distance. At
the end, for alignment-free distances, we propose an extension by adopting the
coverage criterion, show how it performs, and indicate how it can be
efficiently computed.
