29,345 research outputs found
On the Complexity of Searching in Trees: Average-case Minimization
We focus on the average-case analysis: A function w : V -> Z+ is given which
defines the likelihood for a node to be the one marked, and we want the
strategy that minimizes the expected number of queries. Prior to this paper,
very little was known about this natural question and the complexity of the
problem had remained so far an open question.
We close this question and prove that the above tree search problem is
NP-complete even for the class of trees with diameter at most 4. This results
in a complete characterization of the complexity of the problem with respect to
the diameter size. In fact, for diameter not larger than 3 the problem can be
shown to be polynomially solvable using a dynamic programming approach.
In addition we prove that the problem is NP-complete even for the class of
trees of maximum degree at most 16. To the best of our knowledge, the only
known result in this direction is that the tree search problem is solvable in
O(|V| log|V|) time for trees with degree at most 2 (paths).
We match the above complexity results with a tight algorithmic analysis. We
first show that a natural greedy algorithm attains a 2-approximation.
Furthermore, for the bounded degree instances, we show that any optimal
strategy (i.e., one that minimizes the expected number of queries) performs at
most O(\Delta(T) (log |V| + log w(T))) queries in the worst case, where w(T) is
the sum of the likelihoods of the nodes of T and \Delta(T) is the maximum
degree of T. We combine this result with a non-trivial exponential time
algorithm to provide an FPTAS for trees with bounded degree
Wavelet Trees Meet Suffix Trees
We present an improved wavelet tree construction algorithm and discuss its
applications to a number of rank/select problems for integer keys and strings.
Given a string of length n over an alphabet of size , our
method builds the wavelet tree in time,
improving upon the state-of-the-art algorithm by a factor of .
As a consequence, given an array of n integers we can construct in time a data structure consisting of machine words and
capable of answering rank/select queries for the subranges of the array in
time. This is a -factor improvement in
query time compared to Chan and P\u{a}tra\c{s}cu and a -factor
improvement in construction time compared to Brodal et al.
Next, we switch to stringological context and propose a novel notion of
wavelet suffix trees. For a string w of length n, this data structure occupies
words, takes time to construct, and simultaneously
captures the combinatorial structure of substrings of w while enabling
efficient top-down traversal and binary search. In particular, with a wavelet
suffix tree we are able to answer in time the following two
natural analogues of rank/select queries for suffixes of substrings: for
substrings x and y of w count the number of suffixes of x that are
lexicographically smaller than y, and for a substring x of w and an integer k,
find the k-th lexicographically smallest suffix of x.
We further show that wavelet suffix trees allow to compute a
run-length-encoded Burrows-Wheeler transform of a substring x of w in time, where s denotes the length of the resulting run-length encoding.
This answers a question by Cormode and Muthukrishnan, who considered an
analogous problem for Lempel-Ziv compression.Comment: 33 pages, 5 figures; preliminary version published at SODA 201
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