Fast Algorithm for Partial Covers in Words

A factor $u$ of a word $w$ is a cover of $w$ if every position in $w$ lies within some occurrence of $u$ in $w$. A word $w$ covered by $u$ thus generalizes the idea of a repetition, that is, a word composed of exact concatenations of $u$. In this article we introduce a new notion of $\alpha$-partial cover, which can be viewed as a relaxed variant of cover, that is, a factor covering at least $\alpha$ positions in $w$. We develop a data structure of $O(n)$ size (where $n=|w|$) that can be constructed in $O(n\log n)$ time which we apply to compute all shortest $\alpha$-partial covers for a given $\alpha$. We also employ it for an $O(n\log n)$-time algorithm computing a shortest $\alpha$-partial cover for each $\alpha=1,2,\ldots,n$

Covering Problems for Partial Words and for Indeterminate Strings

We consider the problem of computing a shortest solid cover of an indeterminate string. An indeterminate string may contain non-solid symbols, each of which specifies a subset of the alphabet that could be present at the corresponding position. We also consider covering partial words, which are a special case of indeterminate strings where each non-solid symbol is a don't care symbol. We prove that indeterminate string covering problem and partial word covering problem are NP-complete for binary alphabet and show that both problems are fixed-parameter tractable with respect to $k$, the number of non-solid symbols. For the indeterminate string covering problem we obtain a $2^{O(k \log k)} + n k^{O(1)}$-time algorithm. For the partial word covering problem we obtain a $2^{O(\sqrt{k}\log k)} + nk^{O(1)}$-time algorithm. We prove that, unless the Exponential Time Hypothesis is false, no $2^{o(\sqrt{k})} n^{O(1)}$-time solution exists for either problem, which shows that our algorithm for this case is close to optimal. We also present an algorithm for both problems which is feasible in practice.Comment: full version (simplified and corrected); preliminary version appeared at ISAAC 2014; 14 pages, 4 figure

Quasi-Periodicity in Streams

In this work, we show two streaming algorithms for computing the length of the shortest cover of a string of length n. We start by showing a two-pass algorithm that uses O(log^2 n) space and then show a one-pass streaming algorithm that uses O(sqrt{n log n}) space. Both algorithms run in near-linear time. The algorithms are randomized and compute the answer incorrectly with probability inverse-polynomial in n. We also show that there is no sublinear-space streaming algorithm for computing the length of the shortest seed of a string

Linear-Time Computation of Cyclic Roots and Cyclic Covers of a String

Cyclic versions of covers and roots of a string are considered in this paper. A prefix V of a string S is a cyclic root of S if S is a concatenation of cyclic rotations of V. A prefix V of S is a cyclic cover of S if the occurrences of the cyclic rotations of V cover all positions of S. We present ?(n)-time algorithms computing all cyclic roots (using number-theoretic tools) and all cyclic covers (using tools related to seeds) of a length-n string over an integer alphabet. Our results improve upon ?(n log log n) and ?(n log n) time complexities of recent algorithms of Grossi et al. (WALCOM 2023) for the respective problems and provide novel approaches to the problems. As a by-product, we obtain an optimal data structure for Internal Circular Pattern Matching queries that generalize Internal Pattern Matching and Cyclic Equivalence queries of Kociumaka et al. (SODA 2015)