The statistics in each column of the table are associated with some position in a sequence. StatPlot figures out a scale for each column and then plots all of the statistics in parallel. You can choose the density in bases per cm along the horizontal axis so that different runs of StatPlot may be compared. The patterns are then evaluated regarding the number of false positives they identify. The search engine is based on a string-graph algorithm for matching TOPS diagrams to patterns, and uses constraint propagation to prune the search space.
Users can search on motifs from a library or define their own search patterns.
The output is a table of numbers suitable for input to the StatPlot program. The window is moved along the sequence by a shift increment, and the number of observations of the pattern at every window position is measured. The frequency can be reported as a fraction, a percent, or simply a number of observations. You can also ask to see the difference between the number of observations of the pattern and the expected number of observations for a random sequence of identical composition. Another statistic lets you see the difference in frequency between two patterns.