Mind the Gap: Essentially Optimal Algorithms for Online Dictionary Matching with One Gap

We examine the complexity of the online Dictionary Matching with One Gap Problem (DMOG) which is the following. Preprocess a dictionary D of d patterns, where each pattern contains a special gap symbol that can match any string, so that given a text that arrives online, a character at a time, we can report all of the patterns from D that are suffixes of the text that has arrived so far, before the next character arrives. In more general versions the gap symbols are associated with bounds determining the possible lengths of matching strings. Online DMOG captures the difficulty in a bottleneck procedure for cyber-security, as many digital signatures of viruses manifest themselves as patterns with a single gap. In this paper, we demonstrate that the difficulty in obtaining efficient solutions for the DMOG problem, even in the offline setting, can be traced back to the infamous 3SUM conjecture. We show a conditional lower bound of Omega(delta(G_D)+op) time per text character, where G_D is a bipartite graph that captures the structure of D, delta(G_D) is the degeneracy of this graph, and op is the output size. Moreover, we show a conditional lower bound in terms of the magnitude of gaps for the bounded case, thereby showing that some known offline upper bounds are essentially optimal. We also provide matching upper-bounds (up to sub-polynomial factors), in terms of the degeneracy, for the online DMOG problem. In particular, we introduce algorithms whose time cost depends linearly on delta(G_D). Our algorithms make use of graph orientations, together with some additional techniques. These algorithms are of practical interest since although delta(G_D) can be as large as sqrt(d), and even larger if G_D is a multi-graph, it is typically a very small constant in practice. Finally, when delta(G_D) is large we are able to obtain even more efficient solutions

Partial Permutations Comparison, Maintenance and Applications

This paper focuses on the concept of partial permutations and their use in algorithmic tasks. A partial permutation over ? is a bijection ?_{par}: ????? mapping a subset ?? ? ? to a subset ?? ? ?, where |??| = |??| (|?| denotes the size of a set ?). Intuitively, two partial permutations agree if their mapping pairs do not form conflicts. This notion, which is formally defined in this paper, enables a consistent as well as informatively rich comparison between partial permutations. We formalize the Partial Permutations Agreement problem (PPA), as follows. Given two sets A?, A? of partial permutations over alphabet ?, each of size n, output all pairs (?_i, ?_j), where ?_i ? A?, ?_j ? A? and ?_i agrees with ?_j. The possibility of having a data structure for efficiently maintaining a dynamic set of partial permutations enabling to retrieve agreement of partial permutations is then studied, giving both negative and positive results. Applying our study enables to point out fruitful versus futile methods for efficient genes sequences comparison in database or automatic color transformation data augmentation technique for image processing through neural networks. It also shows that an efficient solution of strict Parameterized Dictionary Matching with One Gap (PDMOG) over general dictionary alphabets is not likely, unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) fails, thus negatively answering an open question posed lately

Generalized LCS

The Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) is a well studied problem, having a wide range of implementations. Its motivation is in comparing strings. It has long been of interest to devise a similar measure for comparing higher dimensional objects, and more complex structures. In this paper we study the Longest Common Substructure of two matrices and show that this problem is N P-hard. We also study the Longest Common Subforest problem for multiple trees including a constrained version, as well. We show N P-hardness for k> 2 unordered trees in the constrained LCS. We also give polynomial time algorithms for ordered trees and prove a lower bound for any decomposition strategy for k trees