Given strings $P$ and $Q$ the (exact) string matching problem is to find all positions of substrings in $Q$ matching $P$. The classical Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm [SIAM J. Comput., 1977] solves the string matching problem in linear time which is optimal if we can only read one character at the time. However, most strings are stored in a computer in a packed representation with several characters in a single word, giving us the opportunity to read multiple characters simultaneously. In this paper we study the worst-case complexity of string matching on strings given in packed representation. Let $m \leq n$ be the lengths $P$ and $Q$, respectively, and let $σ$ denote the size of the alphabet. On a standard unit-cost word-RAM with logarithmic word size we present an algorithm using time $$ O\left(\frac{n}{\log_σn} + m + \occ\right). $$ Here $\occ$ is the number of occurrences of $P$ in $Q$. For $m = o(n)$ this improves the $O(n)$ bound of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm. Furthermore, if $m = O(n/\log_σn)$ our algorithm is optimal since any algorithm must spend at least $Ω(\frac{(n+m)\log
σ}{\log n} + \occ) = Ω(\frac{n}{\log_σn} + \occ)$ time to read the input and report all occurrences. The result is obtained by a novel automaton construction based on the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm combined with a new compact representation of subautomata allowing an optimal tabulation-based simulation.
Given a string $S$ of length $n$, the classic string indexing problem is to preprocess $S$ into a compact data structure that supports efficient subsequent pattern queries. In the \emph{deterministic} variant the goal is to solve the string indexing problem without any randomization (at preprocessing time or query time). In the \emph{packed} variant the strings are stored with several character in a single word, giving us the opportunity to read multiple characters simultaneously. Our main result is a new string index in the deterministic \emph{and} packed setting. Given a packed string $S$ of…
In this paper, we present a new data structure called the packed compact trie (packed c-trie) which stores a set $S$ of $k$ strings of total length $n$ in $n \logσ+ O(k \log n)$ bits of space and supports fast pattern matching queries and updates, where $σ$ is the size of an alphabet. Assume that $α= \log_σn$ letters are packed in a single machine word on the standard word RAM model, and let $f(k,n)$ denote the query and update times of the dynamic predecessor/successor data structure of our choice which stores $k$ integers from universe $[1,n]$ in $O(k \log n)$ bits of space. Then, given a st…
Although several self-indexes for highly repetitive text collections exist, developing an index and search algorithm with editing operations remains a challenge. Edit distance with moves (EDM) is a string-to-string distance measure that includes substring moves in addition to ordinal editing operations to turn one string into another. Although the problem of computing EDM is intractable, it has a wide range of potential applications, especially in approximate string retrieval. Despite the importance of computing EDM, there has been no efficient method for indexing and searching large text coll…
Motivation: The pan-genome can be stored as elastic-degenerate (ED) string, a recently introduced compact representation of multiple overlapping sequences. However, a search over the ED string does not indicate which individuals (if any) match the entire query. Results: We augment the ED string with sources (individuals' indexes) and propose an extension of the SOPanG (Shift-Or for Pan-Genome) tool to report only true positive matches, omitting those not occurring in any of the haplotypes. The additional stage for checking the matches yields a penalty of less than 3.5% relative speed in practi…
Strings form a fundamental data type in computer systems. String searching has been extensively studied since the inception of computer science. Increasingly many applications have to deal with imprecise strings or strings with fuzzy information in them. String matching becomes a probabilistic event when a string contains uncertainty, i.e. each position of the string can have different probable characters with associated probability of occurrence for each character. Such uncertain strings are prevalent in various applications such as biological sequence data, event monitoring and automatic ECG…
In this work, we present a literature review for full-text and keyword indexes as well as our contributions (which are mostly practice-oriented). The first contribution is the FM-bloated index, which is a modification of the well-known FM-index (a compressed, full-text index) that trades space for speed. In our approach, the count table and the occurrence lists store information about selected $q$-grams in addition to the individual characters. Two variants are described, namely one using $O(n \log^2 n)$ bits of space with $O(m + \log m \log \log n)$ average query time, and one with linear spa…
Searching for all occurrences of a pattern in a text is a fundamental problem in computer science with applications in many other fields, like natural language processing, information retrieval and computational biology. Sampled string matching is an efficient approach recently introduced in order to overcome the prohibitive space requirements of an index construction, on the one hand, and drastically reduce searching time for the online solutions, on the other hand. In this paper we present a new algorithm for the sampled string matching problem, based on a characters distance sampling approa…
Unbalanced translocations are among the most frequent chromosomal alterations, accounted for 30\% of all losses of heterozygosity, a major genetic event causing inactivation of tumor suppressor genes. Despite of their central role in genomic sequence analysis, little attention has been devoted to the problem of matching sequences allowing for this kind of chromosomal alteration. In this paper we investigate the \emph{approximate string matching} problem when the edit operations are non-overlapping unbalanced translocations of adjacent factors. In particular, we first present a $O(nm^3)$-time a…
More than 120 algorithms have been developed for exact string matching within the last 40 years. We show by experiments that the \naive{} algorithm exploiting SIMD instructions of modern CPUs (with symbols compared in a special order) is the fastest one for patterns of length up to about 50 symbols and extremely good for longer patterns and small alphabets. The algorithm compares 16 or 32 characters in parallel by applying SSE2 or AVX2 instructions, respectively. Moreover, it uses loop peeling to further speed up the searching phase. We tried several orders for comparisons of pattern symbols a…
A degenerate or indeterminate string on an alphabet $Σ$ is a sequence of non-empty subsets of $Σ$. Given a degenerate string $t$ of length $n$, we present a new method based on the Burrows--Wheeler transform for searching for a degenerate pattern of length $m$ in $t$ running in $O(mn)$ time on a constant size alphabet $Σ$. Furthermore, it is a hybrid pattern-matching technique that works on both regular and degenerate strings. A degenerate string is said to be conservative if its number of non-solid letters is upper-bounded by a fixed positive constant $q$; in this case we show that the search…
In this paper we investigate the \emph{approximate string matching problem} when the allowed edit operations are \emph{non-overlapping unbalanced translocations of adjacent factors}. Such kind of edit operations take place when two adjacent sub-strings of the text swap, resulting in a modified string. The two involved substrings are allowed to be of different lengths. Such large-scale modifications on strings have various applications. They are among the most frequent chromosomal alterations, accounted for 30\% of all losses of heterozygosity, a major genetic event causing inactivation of canc…
Efficiently word storing and searching is an important task in computer science. An application space complexity, time complexity, and overall performance depend on this string data. Many word searching data structures and algorithms exist in the current world but few of them have space compress ability. Trie is a popular data structure for word searching for its linear searching capability. It is the basic and important part of various computer applications such as information retrieval, natural language processing, database system, compiler, and computer network. But currently, the available…
Indexing highly repetitive texts - such as genomic databases, software repositories and versioned text collections - has become an important problem since the turn of the millennium. A relevant compressibility measure for repetitive texts is r, the number of runs in their Burrows-Wheeler Transforms (BWTs). One of the earliest indexes for repetitive collections, the Run-Length FM-index, used O(r) space and was able to efficiently count the number of occurrences of a pattern of length m in the text (in loglogarithmic time per pattern symbol, with current techniques). However, it was unable to lo…
Exact string matching has been a fundamental problem in computer science for decades because of many practical applications. Some are related to common procedures, such as searching in files and text editors, or, more recently, to more advanced problems such as pattern detection in Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics. Tens of algorithms and methodologies have been developed for pattern matching and several programming languages, packages, applications and online systems exist that can perform exact string matching in biological sequences. These techniques, however, are limited to search…
In this paper we study a variant of string pattern matching which deals with tuples of strings known as \textit{multi-track strings}. Multi-track strings are a generalisation of strings (or \textit{single-track strings}) that have primarily found uses in problems related to searching multiple genomes and music information retrieval. A multi-track string $\mathcal{T} = (t_1, t_2, t_3, \ldots , t_N)$ of length $n$ and track count $N$ is a multi-set of $N$ strings of length $n$ with characters drawn from a common alphabet of size $σ_U$. Given two multi-track strings $\mathcal{T} = (t_1, t_2, t_3,…
Although real-world text datasets, such as DNA sequences, are far from being uniformly random, average-case string searching algorithms perform significantly better than worst-case ones in most applications of interest. In this paper, we study the problem of computing the longest prefix of each suffix of a given string of length $n$ over a constant-sized alphabet that occurs elsewhere in the string with $k$-errors. This problem has already been studied under the Hamming distance model. Our first result is an improvement upon the state-of-the-art average-case time complexity for non-constant $k…
University of Udine（乌迪内大学）；University of Newcastle（纽卡斯尔大学）
We study the complexity of the problem of searching for a set of patterns that separate two given sets of strings. This problem has applications in a wide variety of areas, most notably in data mining, computational biology, and in understanding the complexity of genetic algorithms. We show that the basic problem of finding a small set of patterns that match one set of strings but do not match any string in a second set is difficult (NP-complete, W[2]-hard when parameterized by the size of the pattern set, and APX-hard). We then perform a detailed parameterized analysis of the problem, separat…
String matching is the problem of finding all the substrings of a text which match a given pattern. It is one of the most investigated problems in computer science, mainly due to its very diverse applications in several fields. Recently, much research in the string matching field has focused on the efficiency and flexibility of the searching procedure and quite effective techniques have been proposed for speeding up the existing solutions. In this context, algorithms based on factors recognition are among the best solutions. In this paper, we present a simple and very efficient algorithm for s…
We study algorithms for solving three problems on strings. The first one is the Most Frequently String Search Problem. The problem is the following. Assume that we have a sequence of $n$ strings of length $k$. The problem is finding the string that occurs in the sequence most often. We propose a quantum algorithm that has a query complexity $\tilde{O}(n \sqrt{k})$. This algorithm shows speed-up comparing with the deterministic algorithm that requires $Ω(nk)$ queries. The second one is searching intersection of two sequences of strings. All strings have the same length $k$. The size of the firs…
