Faster Approximate String Matching for Short Patterns

We study the classical approximate string matching problem, that is, given strings $P$ and $Q$ and an error threshold $k$, find all ending positions of substrings of $Q$ whose edit distance to $P$ is at most $k$. Let $P$ and $Q$ have lengths $m$ and $n$, respectively. On a standard unit-cost word RAM with word size $w \geq \log n$ we present an algorithm using time $$O(nk \cdot \min(\frac{\log^2 m}{\log n},\frac{\log^2 m\log w}{w}) + n)$$ When $P$ is short, namely, $m = 2^{o(\sqrt{\log n})}$ or $m = 2^{o(\sqrt{w/\log w})}$ this improves the previously best known time bounds for the problem. The result is achieved using a novel implementation of the Landau-Vishkin algorithm based on tabulation and word-level parallelism.Comment: To appear in Theory of Computing System

The set LCS problem

An efficient algorithm is presented that solves a generalization of the Longest Common Subsequence problem, in which one of the two input strings contains sets of symbols which may be permuted. This problem arises from a music application

LRM-Trees: Compressed Indices, Adaptive Sorting, and Compressed Permutations

LRM-Trees are an elegant way to partition a sequence of values into sorted consecutive blocks, and to express the relative position of the first element of each block within a previous block. They were used to encode ordinal trees and to index integer arrays in order to support range minimum queries on them. We describe how they yield many other convenient results in a variety of areas, from data structures to algorithms: some compressed succinct indices for range minimum queries; a new adaptive sorting algorithm; and a compressed succinct data structure for permutations supporting direct and indirect application in time all the shortest as the permutation is compressible.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur