106,645 research outputs found
The streaming -mismatch problem
We consider the streaming complexity of a fundamental task in approximate
pattern matching: the -mismatch problem. It asks to compute Hamming
distances between a pattern of length and all length- substrings of a
text for which the Hamming distance does not exceed a given threshold . In
our problem formulation, we report not only the Hamming distance but also, on
demand, the full \emph{mismatch information}, that is the list of mismatched
pairs of symbols and their indices. The twin challenges of streaming pattern
matching derive from the need both to achieve small working space and also to
guarantee that every arriving input symbol is processed quickly.
We present a streaming algorithm for the -mismatch problem which uses
bits of space and spends \ourcomplexity time on
each symbol of the input stream, which consists of the pattern followed by the
text. The running time almost matches the classic offline solution and the
space usage is within a logarithmic factor of optimal.
Our new algorithm therefore effectively resolves and also extends an open
problem first posed in FOCS'09. En route to this solution, we also give a
deterministic -bit encoding of all
the alignments with Hamming distance at most of a length- pattern within
a text of length . This secondary result provides an optimal solution to
a natural communication complexity problem which may be of independent
interest.Comment: 27 page
A Compact Index for Order-Preserving Pattern Matching
Order-preserving pattern matching was introduced recently but it has already
attracted much attention. Given a reference sequence and a pattern, we want to
locate all substrings of the reference sequence whose elements have the same
relative order as the pattern elements. For this problem we consider the
offline version in which we build an index for the reference sequence so that
subsequent searches can be completed very efficiently. We propose a
space-efficient index that works well in practice despite its lack of good
worst-case time bounds. Our solution is based on the new approach of
decomposing the indexed sequence into an order component, containing ordering
information, and a delta component, containing information on the absolute
values. Experiments show that this approach is viable, faster than the
available alternatives, and it is the first one offering simultaneously small
space usage and fast retrieval.Comment: 16 pages. A preliminary version appeared in the Proc. IEEE Data
Compression Conference, DCC 2017, Snowbird, UT, USA, 201
Towards the quantification of the semantic information encoded in written language
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying
information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local
order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range
patterns in word usage. Here, we show that a direct application of information
theory quantifies the relationship between the statistical distribution of
words and the semantic content of the text. We show that there is a
characteristic scale, roughly around a few thousand words, which establishes
the typical size of the most informative segments in written language.
Moreover, we find that the words whose contributions to the overall information
is larger, are the ones more closely associated with the main subjects and
topics of the text. This scenario can be explained by a model of word usage
that assumes that words are distributed along the text in domains of a
characteristic size where their frequency is higher than elsewhere. Our
conclusions are based on the analysis of a large database of written language,
diverse in subjects and styles, and thus are likely to be applicable to general
language sequences encoding complex information.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure
A Proof of Entropy Minimization for Outputs in Deletion Channels via Hidden Word Statistics
From the output produced by a memoryless deletion channel from a uniformly
random input of known length , one obtains a posterior distribution on the
channel input. The difference between the Shannon entropy of this distribution
and that of the uniform prior measures the amount of information about the
channel input which is conveyed by the output of length , and it is natural
to ask for which outputs this is extremized. This question was posed in a
previous work, where it was conjectured on the basis of experimental data that
the entropy of the posterior is minimized and maximized by the constant strings
and and the alternating strings
and respectively. In the present
work we confirm the minimization conjecture in the asymptotic limit using
results from hidden word statistics. We show how the analytic-combinatorial
methods of Flajolet, Szpankowski and Vall\'ee for dealing with the hidden
pattern matching problem can be applied to resolve the case of fixed output
length and , by obtaining estimates for the entropy in
terms of the moments of the posterior distribution and establishing its
minimization via a measure of autocorrelation.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure
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