Fig. 2

Evaluating and peeling cycles. Numbers inside nodes indicate coverage. All nodes in the example have equal length. A Cycles (a,e,f) and (c,e,g) have the same average coverage (13.33) and coefficient of variation (CV, 0.35), but their discounted CV values differ: The discounted coverage of node a is 6, and the discounted coverage of node e is 10 in both cycles. The left cycle has discounted CV=0.22 and the right has discounted CV=0. By peeling off the mean discounted coverage of the right cycle (10) one gets the graph in B. Note that nodes g,c were removed from the graph since their coverage was reduced to 0, and the coverage of node e was reduced to 10