Contact Matrix Compressor

The study of three-dimensional folding of chromosomes is important to understand genomics processes. This is done through techniques, such as Hi-C, that analyze the spatial organization of chromosomes in a cell. The data coming from the study is a 2-dimensional quantitative maps with genomic coordinate systems. We present a novel approach called Contact Matrix Compressor(CMC) for the efficient compression of Hi-C data. By exploiting the properties of the data, such as diagonally dominant and symmetrical, CMC achieves a much higher compression. CMC outperforms the existing method Cooler, and also the generic compression methods LZMA as well as BZip2.