BigDEC: A Multi-Algorithm Big Data Tool Based on the K-Mer Spectrum Method for Scalable Short-Read Error Correction

Despite the significant improvements in both throughput and cost provided by modern Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) platforms, sequencing errors in NGS datasets can still degrade the quality of downstream analysis. Although state-of-the-art correction tools can provide high accuracy to improve such analysis, they are limited to apply a single correction algorithm while also requiring long runtimes when processing large NGS datasets. Furthermore, current parallel correctors generally only provide efficient support for shared-memory systems lacking the ability to scale out across a cluster of multicore nodes, or they require the availability of specific hardware devices or features. In this paper we present a Big Data Error Correction (BigDEC) tool that overcomes all those limitations by: (1) implementing three different error correction algorithms based on the widely extended k-mer spectrum method; (2) providing scalable performance for large datasets by efficiently exploiting the capabilities of Big Data technologies on multicore clusters based on commodity hardware; (3) supporting two different Big Data processing frameworks (Spark and Flink) to provide greater flexibility to end users; (4) including an efficient, stream-based merge operation to ease downstream processing of the corrected datasets; and (5) significantly outperforming existing parallel tools, being up to 79% faster on a 16-node multicore cluster when using the same underlying correction algorithm. BigDEC is publicly available to download at https://github.com/UDC-GAC/BigDEC.