A run is a maximal occurrence of a repetition $v$ with a period $p$ such that $2p \le |v|$. The maximal number of runs in a string of length $n$ was studied by several authors and it is known to be between $0.944 n$ and $1.029 n$. We investigate highly periodic runs, in which the shortest period $p$ satisfies $3p \le |v|$. We show the upper bound $0.5n$ on the maximal number of such runs in a string of length $n$ and construct a sequence of words for which we obtain the lower bound $0.406 n$.
We give a new characterization of maximal repetitions (or runs) in strings based on Lyndon words. The characterization leads to a proof of what was known as the "runs" conjecture (Kolpakov \& Kucherov (FOCS '99)), which states that the maximum number of runs $ρ(n)$ in a string of length $n$ is less than $n$. The proof is remarkably simple, considering the numerous endeavors to tackle this problem in the last 15 years, and significantly improves our understanding of how runs can occur in strings. In addition, we obtain an upper bound of $3n$ for the maximum sum of exponents $σ(n)$ of runs in a …
The notions of periodicity and repetitions in strings, and hence these of runs and squares, naturally extend to two-dimensional strings. We consider two types of repetitions in 2D-strings: 2D-runs and quartics (quartics are a 2D-version of squares in standard strings). Amir et al. introduced 2D-runs, showed that there are $O(n^3)$ of them in an $n \times n$ 2D-string and presented a simple construction giving a lower bound of $Ω(n^2)$ for their number (TCS 2020). We make a significant step towards closing the gap between these bounds by showing that the number of 2D-runs in an $n \times n$ 2D-…
A run in a string is a maximal periodic substring. For example, the string $\texttt{bananatree}$ contains the runs $\texttt{anana} = (\texttt{an})^{3/2}$ and $\texttt{ee} = \texttt{e}^2$. There are less than $n$ runs in any length-$n$ string, and computing all runs for a string over a linearly-sortable alphabet takes $\mathcal{O}(n)$ time (Bannai et al., SODA 2015). Kosolobov conjectured that there also exists a linear time runs algorithm for general ordered alphabets (Inf. Process. Lett. 2016). The conjecture was almost proven by Crochemore et al., who presented an $\mathcal{O}(nα(n))$ time a…
The compression of highly repetitive strings (i.e., strings with many repetitions) has been a central research topic in string processing, and quite a few compression methods for these strings have been proposed thus far. Among them, an efficient compression format gathering increasing attention is the run-length Burrows--Wheeler transform (RLBWT), which is a run-length encoded BWT as a reversible permutation of an input string on the lexicographical order of suffixes. State-of-the-art construction algorithms of RLBWT have a serious issue with respect to (i) non-optimal computation time or (ii…
Indexing highly repetitive strings (i.e., strings with many repetitions) for fast queries has become a central research topic in string processing, because it has a wide variety of applications in bioinformatics and natural language processing. Although a substantial number of indexes for highly repetitive strings have been proposed thus far, developing compressed indexes that support various queries remains a challenge. The run-length Burrows-Wheeler transform (RLBWT) is a lossless data compression by a reversible permutation of an input string and run-length encoding, and it has received int…
Enumerating characteristic substrings (e.g., maximal repeats, minimal unique substrings, and minimal absent words) in a given string has been an important research topic because there are a wide variety of applications in various areas such as string processing and computational biology. Although several enumeration algorithms for characteristic substrings have been proposed, they are not space-efficient in that their space-usage is proportional to the length of an input string. Recently, the run-length encoded Burrows-Wheeler transform (RLBWT) has attracted increased attention in string proce…
A maximal repetition, or run, in a string, is a maximal periodic substring whose smallest period is at most half the length of the substring. In this paper, we consider runs that correspond to a path on a trie, or in other words, on a rooted edge-labeled tree where the endpoints of the path must be a descendant/ancestor of the other. For a trie with $n$ edges, we show that the number of runs is less than $n$. We also show an asymptotic lower bound on the maximum density of runs in tries: $\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}ρ_\mathcal{T}(n)/n \geq 0.993238$ where $ρ_{\mathcal{T}}(n)$ is the maximum numbe…
The cornerstone of any algorithm computing all repetitions in a string of length n in O(n) time is the fact that the number of runs (or maximal repetitions) is O(n). We give a simple proof of this result. As a consequence of our approach, the stronger result concerning the linearity of the sum of exponents of all runs follows easily.
The work takes another look at the number of runs that a string might contain and provides an alternative proof for the bound. We also propose another stronger conjecture that states that, for a fixed order on the alphabet, within every factor of a word there are at most as many occurrences of Lyndon roots corresponding to runs in a word as the length of the factor (only first such occurrences for each run are considered).
Important papers have appeared recently on the problem of indexing binary strings for jumbled pattern matching, and further lowering the time bounds in terms of the input size would now be a breakthrough with broad implications. We can still make progress on the problem, however, by considering other natural parameters. Badkobeh et al.\ (IPL, 2013) and Amir et al.\ (TCS, 2016) gave algorithms that index a binary string in $O (n + ρ^2 \log ρ)$ time, where $n$ is the length and $ρ$ is the number of runs, and Giaquinta and Grabowski (IPL, 2013) gave one that runs in $O (n + ρ^2)$ time. In this pa…
This paper provides an upper bound for several subsets of maximal repeats and maximal pairs in compressed strings and also presents a formerly unknown relationship between maximal pairs and the run-length Burrows-Wheeler transform. This relationship is used to obtain a different proof for the Burrows-Wheeler conjecture which has recently been proven by Kempa and Kociumaka in "Resolution of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform Conjecture". More formally, this paper proves that a string $S$ with $z$ LZ77-factors and without $q$-th powers has at most $73(\log_2 |S|)(z+2)^2$ runs in the run-length Burrow…
It is known that the exact form of the Burrows-Wheeler-Transform (BWT) of a string collection depends, in most implementations, on the input order of the strings in the collection. Reordering strings of an input collection affects the number of equal-letter runs $r$, arguably the most important parameter of BWT-based data structures, such as the FM-index or the $r$-index. Bentley, Gibney, and Thankachan [ESA 2020] introduced a linear-time algorithm for computing the permutation of the input collection which yields the minimum number of runs of the resulting BWT. In this paper, we present the f…
A border of a string is a non-empty prefix of the string that is also a suffix of the string, and a string is unbordered if it has no border other than itself. Loptev, Kucherov, and Starikovskaya [CPM 2015] conjectured the following: If we pick a string of length $n$ from a fixed non-unary alphabet uniformly at random, then the expected maximum length of its unbordered factors is $n - O(1)$. We confirm this conjecture by proving that the expected value is, in fact, ${n - Θ(σ^{-1})}$, where $σ$ is the size of the alphabet. This immediately implies that we can find such a maximal unbordered fact…
Given a string $S$ of length $n$, its maximal unbordered factor is the longest factor which does not have a border. In this work we investigate the relationship between $n$ and the length of the maximal unbordered factor of $S$. We prove that for the alphabet of size $σ\ge 5$ the expected length of the maximal unbordered factor of a string of length~$n$ is at least $0.99 n$ (for sufficiently large values of $n$). As an application of this result, we propose a new algorithm for computing the maximal unbordered factor of a string.
Given a word $w$ and a Parikh vector $\mathcal{P}$, an abelian run of period $\mathcal{P}$ in $w$ is a maximal occurrence of a substring of $w$ having abelian period $\mathcal{P}$. We give an algorithm that finds all the abelian runs of period $\mathcal{P}$ in a word of length $n$ in time $O(n\times |\mathcal{P}|)$ and space $O(σ+|\mathcal{P}|)$.
Flashback: A Reversible Bilateral Run-Peeling Decomposition of Strings
Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学工程学院）；Bar-Ilan Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学纳米技术与先进材料研究所）；Department of Pathology, Yale School of Medicine（耶鲁医学院病理学系）
The degeneracy of an $n$-vertex graph $G$ is the smallest number $d$ such that every subgraph of $G$ contains a vertex of degree at most $d$. We show that there exists a nearly-optimal fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for enumerating all maximal cliques, parametrized by degeneracy. To achieve this result, we modify the classic Bron--Kerbosch algorithm and show that it runs in time $O(dn3^{d/3})$. We also provide matching upper and lower bounds showing that the largest possible number of maximal cliques in an $n$-vertex graph with degeneracy $d$ (when $d$ is a multiple of 3 and $n\ge d+3$) i…
Longest common extension queries (often called longest common prefix queries) constitute a fundamental building block in multiple string algorithms, for example computing runs and approximate pattern matching. We show that a sequence of $q$ LCE queries for a string of size $n$ over a general ordered alphabet can be realized in $O(q \log \log n+n\log^*n)$ time making only $O(q+n)$ symbol comparisons. Consequently, all runs in a string over a general ordered alphabet can be computed in $O(n \log \log n)$ time making $O(n)$ symbol comparisons. Our results improve upon a solution by Kosolobov (Inf…
Run-length encoding Burrows-Wheeler Transformed strings, resulting in Run-Length BWT (RLBWT), is a powerful tool for processing highly repetitive strings. We propose a new algorithm for online RLBWT working in run-compressed space, which runs in $O(n\lg r)$ time and $O(r\lg n)$ bits of space, where $n$ is the length of input string $S$ received so far and $r$ is the number of runs in the BWT of the reversed $S$. We improve the state-of-the-art algorithm for online RLBWT in terms of empirical construction time. Adopting the dynamic list for maintaining a total order, we can replace rank queries…
Given a word $w$ and a Parikh vector $\mathcal{P}$, an abelian run of period $\mathcal{P}$ in $w$ is a maximal occurrence of a substring of $w$ having abelian period $\mathcal{P}$. Our main result is an online algorithm that, given a word $w$ of length $n$ over an alphabet of cardinality $σ$ and a Parikh vector $\mathcal{P}$, returns all the abelian runs of period $\mathcal{P}$ in $w$ in time $O(n)$ and space $O(σ+p)$, where $p$ is the norm of $\mathcal{P}$, i.e., the sum of its components. We also present an online algorithm that computes all the abelian runs with periods of norm $p$ in $w$ i…
We study a new generalization of palindromes and gapped palindromes called block palindromes. A block palindrome is a string that becomes a palindrome when identical substrings are replaced with a distinct character. We investigate several properties of block palindromes and in particular, study substrings of a string which are block palindromes. In so doing, we introduce the notion of a \emph{maximal block palindrome}, which leads to a compact representation of all block palindromes that occur in a string. We also propose an algorithm which enumerates all maximal block palindromes that appear…
Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a widely used similarity measure for comparing strings that encode time series data, with applications to areas including bioinformatics, signature verification, and speech recognition. The standard dynamic-programming algorithm for DTW takes $O(n^2)$ time, and there are conditional lower bounds showing that no algorithm can do substantially better. In many applications, however, the strings $x$ and $y$ may contain long runs of repeated letters, meaning that they can be compressed using run-length encoding. A natural question is whether the DTW-distance between th…
Joint Graduate School of Mathematics for Innovation, Kyushu University（九州大学数学创新联合研究生院）；Department of Information Science and Technology, Kyushu University（九州大学信息科学技术系）；Graduate School of Informatics and Engineering, University of Electro-Communications（电波大学信息与工程学院）；Department of Informatics, Kyushu University（九州大学信息学系）
We solve the problems of detecting and counting various forms of regularities in a string represented as a Straight Line Program (SLP). Given an SLP of size $n$ that represents a string $s$ of length $N$, our algorithm compute all runs and squares in $s$ in $O(n^3h)$ time and $O(n^2)$ space, where $h$ is the height of the derivation tree of the SLP. We also show an algorithm to compute all gapped-palindromes in $O(n^3h + gnh\log N)$ time and $O(n^2)$ space, where $g$ is the length of the gap. The key technique of the above solution also allows us to compute the periods and covers of the string…
Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
Finding the common subsequences of $L$ multiple strings has many applications in the area of bioinformatics, computational linguistics, and information retrieval. A well-known result states that finding a Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) for $L$ strings is NP-hard, e.g., the computational complexity is exponential in $L$. In this paper, we develop a randomized algorithm, referred to as {\em Random-MCS}, for finding a random instance of Maximal Common Subsequence ($MCS$) of multiple strings. A common subsequence is {\em maximal} if inserting any character into the subsequence no longer yields a…
The edit distance is a way of quantifying how similar two strings are to one another by counting the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. In this paper we study the computational problem of computing the edit distance between a pair of strings where their distance is bounded by a parameter $k\ll n$. We present two streaming algorithms for computing edit distance: One runs in time $O(n+k^2)$ and the other $n+O(k^3)$. By writing $n+O(k^3)$ we want to emphasize that the number of operations per an input symbol is a s…
Iterated hash functions process strings recursively, one character at a time. At each iteration, they compute a new hash value from the preceding hash value and the next character. We prove that iterated hashing can be pairwise independent, but never 3-wise independent. We show that it can be almost universal over strings much longer than the number of hash values; we bound the maximal string length given the collision probability.
