Palindromic Decompositions with Gaps and Errors

Identifying palindromes in sequences has been an interesting line of research in combinatorics on words and also in computational biology, after the discovery of the relation of palindromes in the DNA sequence with the HIV virus. Efficient algorithms for the factorization of sequences into palindromes and maximal palindromes have been devised in recent years. We extend these studies by allowing gaps in decompositions and errors in palindromes, and also imposing a lower bound to the length of acceptable palindromes. We first present an algorithm for obtaining a palindromic decomposition of a string of length n with the minimal total gap length in time O(n log n * g) and space O(n g), where g is the number of allowed gaps in the decomposition. We then consider a decomposition of the string in maximal \delta-palindromes (i.e. palindromes with \delta errors under the edit or Hamming distance) and g allowed gaps. We present an algorithm to obtain such a decomposition with the minimal total gap length in time O(n (g + \delta)) and space O(n g).Comment: accepted to CSR 201

Finding Maximal 2-Dimensional Palindromes

This paper extends the problem of palindrome searching into a higher dimension, addressing two definitions of 2D palindromes. The first definition implies a square, while the second definition (also known as a centrosymmetric factor), can be any rectangular shape. We describe two algorithms for searching a 2D text for maximal palindromes, one for each type of 2D palindrome. The first algorithm is optimal; it runs in linear time, on par with Manacher\u27s linear time 1D palindrome algorithm. The second algorithm searches a text of size n_1 x n_2 (n_1 >= n_2) in O(n_2) time for each of its n_1 x n_2 positions. Since each position may have up to O(n_2) maximal palindromes centered at that location, the second result is also optimal in terms of the worst-case output size