Fast Exact String Pattern-matching Algorithms Adapted to the Characteristics of the Medical Language

Objective: The authors consider the problem of exact string pattern matching using algorithms that do not require any preprocessing. To choose the most appropriate algorithm, distinctive features of the medical language must be taken into account. The characteristics of medical language are emphasized in this regard, the best algorithm of those reviewed is proposed, and detailed evaluations of time complexity for processing medical texts are provided. Design: The authors first illustrate and discuss the techniques of various string pattern-matching algorithms. Next, the source code and the behavior of representative exact string pattern-matching algorithms are presented in a comprehensive manner to promote their implementation. Detailed explanations of the use of various techniques to improve performance are given. Measurements: Real-time measures of time complexity with English medical texts are presented. They lead to results distinct from those found in the computer science literature, which are typically computed with normally distributed texts. Results: The Boyer-Moore-Horspool algorithm achieves the best overall results when used with medical texts. This algorithm usually performs at least twice as fast as the other algorithms tested. Conclusion: The time performance of exact string pattern matching can be greatly improved if an efficient algorithm is used. Considering the growing amount of text handled in the electronic patient record, it is worth implementing this efficient algorith

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

Prospects and limitations of full-text index structures in genome analysis

The combination of incessant advances in sequencing technology producing large amounts of data and innovative bioinformatics approaches, designed to cope with this data flood, has led to new interesting results in the life sciences. Given the magnitude of sequence data to be processed, many bioinformatics tools rely on efficient solutions to a variety of complex string problems. These solutions include fast heuristic algorithms and advanced data structures, generally referred to as index structures. Although the importance of index structures is generally known to the bioinformatics community, the design and potency of these data structures, as well as their properties and limitations, are less understood. Moreover, the last decade has seen a boom in the number of variant index structures featuring complex and diverse memory-time trade-offs. This article brings a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of the most popular index structures and their recently developed variants. Their features, interrelationships, the trade-offs they impose, but also their practical limitations, are explained and compared