Motivation: Analogous to the sequence-to-sequence alignment problem in discrete settings, two time-series
can be aligned based on their longitudinal similarity. In disease contexts, aligning time-series that represent
patient severity levels allows quantifying the similarity in their progression. However, in real-world clinical
settings, patients are hospitalized at varying stages, and measurements are taken at irregular intervals, leading
to sequences of different lengths and sampling rates. This complicates direct comparison of gene expression
profiles and hinders biomarker discovery. Here, we propose a correlation based dynamic programming
algorithm, SynchDP, that aligns and synchronizes two or more clinical time-series sequences with irregular
and asynchronous properties. It is also able to assemble representative patterns from the input sequences de
novo.
Results: Synthetic sequences with gaps and shifts were generated to show that SynchDP successfully aligned
them with significantly higher quality than competitive methods. Longitudinal severity levels of COVID-19
patients were aligned and synchronized using SynchDP to identify patients with deteriorating or recovering
health conditions. For biological validation, based on the alignment results, genes associated to the two
conditions were searched in patient-matched single-cell transcriptome samples and showed that severity
progression-related biomarkers were well captured.