Average-Case Optimal Approximate Circular String Matching

Approximate string matching is the problem of finding all factors of a text t of length n that are at a distance at most k from a pattern x of length m. Approximate circular string matching is the problem of finding all factors of t that are at a distance at most k from x or from any of its rotations. In this article, we present a new algorithm for approximate circular string matching under the edit distance model with optimal average-case search time O(n(k + log m)/m). Optimal average-case search time can also be achieved by the algorithms for multiple approximate string matching (Fredriksson and Navarro, 2004) using x and its rotations as the set of multiple patterns. Here we reduce the preprocessing time and space requirements compared to that approach

Improved algorithms for string searching problems

We present improved practically efficient algorithms for several string searching problems, where we search for a short string called the pattern in a longer string called the text. We are mainly interested in the online problem, where the text is not preprocessed, but we also present a light indexing approach to speed up exact searching of a single pattern. The new algorithms can be applied e.g. to many problems in bioinformatics and other content scanning and filtering problems. In addition to exact string matching, we develop algorithms for several other variations of the string matching problem. We study algorithms for approximate string matching, where a limited number of errors is allowed in the occurrences of the pattern, and parameterized string matching, where a substring of the text matches the pattern if the characters of the substring can be renamed in such a way that the renamed substring matches the pattern exactly. We also consider searching multiple patterns simultaneously and searching weighted patterns, where the weight of a character at a given position reflects the probability of that character occurring at that position. Many of the new algorithms use the backward matching principle, where the characters of the text that are aligned with the pattern are read backward, i.e. from right to left. Another common characteristic of the new algorithms is the use of q-grams, i.e. q consecutive characters are handled as a single character. Many of the new algorithms are bit parallel, i.e. they pack several variables to a single computer word and update all these variables with a single instruction. We show that the q-gram backward string matching algorithms that solve the exact, approximate, or multiple string matching problems are optimal on average. We also show that the q-gram backward string matching algorithm for the parameterized string matching problem is sublinear on average for a class of moderately repetitive patterns. All the presented algorithms are also shown to be fast in practice when compared to earlier algorithms. We also propose an alphabet sampling technique to speed up exact string matching. We choose a subset of the alphabet and select the corresponding subsequence of the text. String matching is then performed on this reduced subsequence and the found matches are verified in the original text. We show how to choose the sampled alphabet optimally and show that the technique speeds up string matching especially for moderate to long patterns

A practical index for approximate dictionary matching with few mismatches

Approximate dictionary matching is a classic string matching problem (checking if a query string occurs in a collection of strings) with applications in, e.g., spellchecking, online catalogs, geolocation, and web searchers. We present a surprisingly simple solution called a split index, which is based on the Dirichlet principle, for matching a keyword with few mismatches, and experimentally show that it offers competitive space-time tradeoffs. Our implementation in the C++ language is focused mostly on data compaction, which is beneficial for the search speed (e.g., by being cache friendly). We compare our solution with other algorithms and we show that it performs better for the Hamming distance. Query times in the order of 1 microsecond were reported for one mismatch for the dictionary size of a few megabytes on a medium-end PC. We also demonstrate that a basic compression technique consisting in $q$-gram substitution can significantly reduce the index size (up to 50% of the input text size for the DNA), while still keeping the query time relatively low

A Bloom filter based semi-index on qq-grams

We present a simple $q$-gram based semi-index, which allows to look for a pattern typically only in a small fraction of text blocks. Several space-time tradeoffs are presented. Experiments on Pizza & Chili datasets show that our solution is up to three orders of magnitude faster than the Claude et al. \cite{CNPSTjda10} semi-index at a comparable space usage