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