Finding approximate palindromes in strings

We introduce a novel definition of approximate palindromes in strings, and provide an algorithm to find all maximal approximate palindromes in a string with up to $k$ errors. Our definition is based on the usual edit operations of approximate pattern matching, and the algorithm we give, for a string of size $n$ on a fixed alphabet, runs in $O(k^2 n)$ time. We also discuss two implementation-related improvements to the algorithm, and demonstrate their efficacy in practice by means of both experiments and an average-case analysis

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

Efficient String Matching on Coded Texts

The so called "four Russians technique'' is often used to speed up algorithms by encoding several data items in a single memory cell. Given a sequence of n symbols over a constant size alphabet, one can encode the sequence into O(n / lambda) memory cells in O(log(lambda) ) time using n / log(lambda) processors. This paper presents an efficient CRCW-PRAM string-matching algorithm for coded texts that takes O(log log(m/lambda)) time making only O(n / lambda ) operations, an improvement by a factor of lambda = O(log n) on the number of operations used in previous algorithms. Using this string-matching algorithm one can test if a string is square-free and find all palindromes in a string in O(log log n) time using n / log log n processors

Palindromic k-Factorization in Pure Linear Time

Given a string s of length n over a general alphabet and an integer k, the problem is to decide whether s is a concatenation of k nonempty palindromes. Two previously known solutions for this problem work in time O(kn) and O(nlog n) respectively. Here we settle the complexity of this problem in the word-RAM model, presenting an O(n)-time online deciding algorithm. The algorithm simultaneously finds the minimum odd number of factors and the minimum even number of factors in a factorization of a string into nonempty palindromes. We also demonstrate how to get an explicit factorization of s into k palindromes with an O(n)-time offline postprocessing

Longest Common Extensions in Sublinear Space

The longest common extension problem (LCE problem) is to construct a data structure for an input string $T$ of length $n$ that supports LCE$(i,j)$ queries. Such a query returns the length of the longest common prefix of the suffixes starting at positions $i$ and $j$ in $T$. This classic problem has a well-known solution that uses $O(n)$ space and $O(1)$ query time. In this paper we show that for any trade-off parameter $1 \leq \tau \leq n$, the problem can be solved in $O(\frac{n}{\tau})$ space and $O(\tau)$ query time. This significantly improves the previously best known time-space trade-offs, and almost matches the best known time-space product lower bound.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper has been accepted to CPM 201