A Practical Algorithm to Find the Best Subsequence Patterns

Given two sets of strings, consider the problem to find a subsequence that is common to one set but never appears in the other set. The problem is known to be NP-complete. We generalize the problem to an optimization problem, and give a practical algorithm to solve it exactly. Our algorithm uses pruning heuristic and subsequence automata, and can find the best subsequence. We show some experiments, that convinced us the approach is quite promising