In the longest common substring problem, we are given two strings of length $n$ and must find a substring of maximal length that occurs in both strings. It is well known that the problem can be solved in linear time, but the solution is not robust and can vary greatly when the input strings are changed even by one character. To circumvent this, Leimeister and Morgenstern introduced the problem of the longest common substring with $k$ mismatches. Lately, this problem has received a lot of attention in the literature. In this paper, we first show a conditional lower bound based on the SETH hypothesis implying that there is little hope to improve existing solutions. We then introduce a new but closely related problem of the longest common substring with approximately $k$ mismatches and use locality-sensitive hashing to show that it admits a solution with strongly subquadratic running time. We also apply these results to obtain a strongly subquadratic-time 2-approximation algorithm for the longest common substring with $k$ mismatches problem and show conditional hardness of improving its approximation ratio.
We revisit the problem of longest common property preserving substring queries introduced by~Ayad et al. (SPIRE 2018, arXiv 2018). We consider a generalized and unified on-line setting, where we are given a set $X$ of $k$ strings of total length $n$ that can be pre-processed so that, given a query string $y$ and a positive integer $k'\leq k$, we can determine the longest substring of $y$ that satisfies some specific property and is common to at least $k'$ strings in $X$. Ayad et al. considered the longest square-free substring in an on-line setting and the longest periodic and palindromic subs…
Finding the longest common subsequence in $k$-length substrings (LCS$k$) is a recently proposed problem motivated by computational biology. This is a generalization of the well-known LCS problem in which matching symbols from two sequences $A$ and $B$ are replaced with matching non-overlapping substrings of length $k$ from $A$ and $B$. We propose several algorithms for LCS$k$, being non-trivial incarnations of the major concepts known from LCS research (dynamic programming, sparse dynamic programming, tabulation). Our algorithms make use of a linear-time and linear-space preprocessing finding …
In the problem of the longest common substring with $k$ mismatches we are given two strings $X, Y$ and must find the maximal length $\ell$ such that there is a length-$\ell$ substring of $X$ and a length-$\ell$ substring of $Y$ that differ in at most $k$ positions. The length $\ell$ can be used as a robust measure of similarity between $X, Y$. In this work, we develop new approximation algorithms for computing $\ell$ that are significantly more efficient that previously known solutions from the theoretical point of view. Our approach is simple and practical, which we confirm via an experimenta…
We describe how, given a text $T [1..n]$ and a positive constant $ε$, we can build a simple $O (z \log n)$-space index, where $z$ is the number of phrases in the LZ77 parse of $T$, such that later, given a pattern $P [1..m]$, in $O (m \log \log z + \mathrm{polylog} (m + z))$ time and with high probability we can find a substring of $P$ that occurs in $T$ and whose length is at least a $(1 - ε)$-fraction of the length of a longest common substring of $P$ and $T$.
Given an arbitrary bitstream, we consider the problem of finding the longest substring whose ratio of ones to zeroes equals a given value. The central result of this paper is an algorithm that solves this problem in linear time. The method involves (i) reformulating the problem as a constrained walk through a sparse matrix, and then (ii) developing a data structure for this sparse matrix that allows us to perform each step of the walk in amortised constant time. We also give a linear time algorithm to find the longest substring whose ratio of ones to zeroes is bounded below by a given value. B…
We consider the longest common subsequence (LCS) problem with the restriction that the common subsequence is required to consist of at least $k$ length substrings. First, we show an $O(mn)$ time algorithm for the problem which gives a better worst-case running time than existing algorithms, where $m$ and $n$ are lengths of the input strings. Furthermore, we mainly consider the LCS in at least $k$ length order-isomorphic substrings problem. We show that the problem can also be solved in $O(mn)$ worst-case time by an easy-to-implement algorithm.
The recently introduced longest common substring with $k$-mismatches ($k$-LCF) problem is to find, given two sequences $S_1$ and $S_2$ of length $n$ each, a longest substring $A_1$ of $S_1$ and $A_2$ of $S_2$ such that the Hamming distance between $A_1$ and $A_2$ is at most $k$. So far, the only subquadratic time result for this problem was known for $k = 1$~\cite{FGKU2014}. We first present two output-dependent algorithms solving the $k$-LCF problem and show that for $k = O(\log^{1-\varepsilon} n)$, where $\varepsilon > 0$, at least one of them works in subquadratic time, using $O(n)$ words o…
The longest common substring with $k$-mismatches problem is to find, given two strings $S_1$ and $S_2$, a longest substring $A_1$ of $S_1$ and $A_2$ of $S_2$ such that the Hamming distance between $A_1$ and $A_2$ is $\le k$. We introduce a practical $O(nm)$ time and $O(1)$ space solution for this problem, where $n$ and $m$ are the lengths of $S_1$ and $S_2$, respectively. This algorithm can also be used to compute the matching statistics with $k$-mismatches of $S_1$ and $S_2$ in $O(nm)$ time and $O(m)$ space. Moreover, we also present a theoretical solution for the $k = 1$ case which runs in $…
Palindromes are important objects in strings which have been extensively studied from combinatorial, algorithmic, and bioinformatics points of views. It is known that the length of the longest palindromic substrings (LPSs) of a given string T of length n can be computed in O(n) time by Manacher's algorithm [J. ACM '75]. In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the LPS after the string is edited. We present an algorithm that uses O(n) time and space for preprocessing, and answers the length of the LPSs in O(\log (\min \{σ, \log n\})) time after a single character substitution, insertio…
Suppose we have two trees on the same set of leaves, in which nodes are weighted such that children are heavier than their parents. We say a node from the first tree and a node from the second tree are induced together if they have a common leaf descendant. In this paper we describe data structures that efficiently support the following heaviest-induced-ancestor query: given a node from the first tree and a node from the second tree, find an induced pair of their ancestors with maximum combined weight. Our solutions are based on a geometric interpretation that enables us to find heaviest induc…
In this paper we define a new problem, motivated by computational biology, $LCSk$ aiming at finding the maximal number of $k$ length $substrings$, matching in both input strings while preserving their order of appearance. The traditional LCS definition is a special case of our problem, where $k = 1$. We provide an algorithm, solving the general case in $O(n^2)$ time, where $n$ is the length of the input strings, equaling the time required for the special case of $k=1$. The space requirement of the algorithm is $O(kn)$. %, however, in order to enable %backtracking of the solution, $O(n^2)$ spac…
Given $m$ documents of total length $n$, we consider the problem of finding a longest string common to at least $d \geq 2$ of the documents. This problem is known as the \emph{longest common substring (LCS) problem} and has a classic $O(n)$ space and $O(n)$ time solution (Weiner [FOCS'73], Hui [CPM'92]). However, the use of linear space is impractical in many applications. In this paper we show that for any trade-off parameter $1 \leq τ\leq n$, the LCS problem can be solved in $O(τ)$ space and $O(n^2/τ)$ time, thus providing the first smooth deterministic time-space trade-off from constant to …
In the longest common substring (LCS) problem, we are given two strings $S$ and $T$, each of length at most $n$, and we are asked to find a longest string occurring as a fragment of both $S$ and $T$. This is a classical and well-studied problem in computer science with a known $\mathcal{O}(n)$-time solution. In the fully dynamic version of the problem, edit operations are allowed in either of the two strings, and we are asked to report an LCS after each such operation. We present the first solution to this problem that requires sublinear time per edit operation. In particular, we show how to r…
Covers are a kind of quasiperiodicity in strings. A string $C$ is a cover of another string $T$ if any position of $T$ is inside some occurrence of $C$ in $T$. The shortest and longest cover arrays of $T$ have the lengths of the shortest and longest covers of each prefix of $T$, respectively. The literature has proposed linear-time algorithms computing longest and shortest cover arrays taking border arrays as input. An equivalence relation $\approx$ over strings is called a substring consistent equivalence relation (SCER) iff $X \approx Y$ implies (1) $|X| = |Y|$ and (2) $X[i:j] \approx Y[i:j]…
In this paper, we consider a generalized longest common subsequence problem with multiple substring inclusive constraints. For the two input sequences $X$ and $Y$ of lengths $n$ and $m$, and a set of $d$ constraints $P=\{P_1,\cdots,P_d\}$ of total length $r$, the problem is to find a common subsequence $Z$ of $X$ and $Y$ including each of constraint string in $P$ as a substring and the length of $Z$ is maximized. A new dynamic programming solution to this problem is presented in this paper. The correctness of the new algorithm is proved. The time complexity of our algorithm is $O(d2^dnmr)$. In…
Repeat finding in strings has important applications in subfields such as computational biology. Surprisingly, all prior work on repeat finding did not consider the constraint on the locality of repeats. In this paper, we propose and study the problem of finding longest repetitive substrings covering particular string positions. We propose an $O(n)$ time and space algorithm for finding the longest repeat covering every position of a string of size $n$. Our work is optimal since the reading and the storage of an input string of size $n$ takes $O(n)$ time and space. Because any substring of a re…
Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is one of the most popular methods for $c$-Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search ($c$-ANNS) in high-dimensional spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel LSH scheme based on the Longest Circular Co-Substring (LCCS) search framework (LCCS-LSH) with a theoretical guarantee. We introduce a novel concept of LCCS and a new data structure named Circular Shift Array (CSA) for $k$-LCCS search. The insight of LCCS search framework is that close data objects will have a longer LCCS than the far-apart ones with high probability. LCCS-LSH is \emph{LSH-family-independent}, an…
Longest Common Substring (LCS) is an important text processing problem, which has recently been investigated in the quantum query model. The decisional version of this problem, LCS with threshold $d$, asks whether two length-$n$ input strings have a common substring of length $d$. The two extreme cases, $d=1$ and $d=n$, correspond respectively to Element Distinctness and Unstructured Search, two fundamental problems in quantum query complexity. However, the intermediate case $1\ll d\ll n$ was not fully understood. We show that the complexity of LCS with threshold $d$ smoothly interpolates betw…
We study quantum algorithms for several fundamental string problems, including Longest Common Substring, Lexicographically Minimal String Rotation, and Longest Square Substring. These problems have been widely studied in the stringology literature since the 1970s, and are known to be solvable by near-linear time classical algorithms. In this work, we give quantum algorithms for these problems with near-optimal query complexities and time complexities. Specifically, we show that: - Longest Common Substring can be solved by a quantum algorithm in $\tilde O(n^{2/3})$ time, improving upon the rece…
In the Palindrome Problem one tries to find all palindromes (palindromic substrings) in a given string. A palindrome is defined as a string which reads forwards the same as backwards, e.g., the string "racecar". A related problem is the Longest Palindromic Substring Problem in which finding an arbitrary one of the longest palindromes in the given string suffices. We regard the streaming version of both problems. In the streaming model the input arrives over time and at every point in time we are only allowed to use sublinear space. The main algorithms in this paper are the following: The first…
A palindrome is a string that reads the same as its reverse, such as "aibohphobia" (fear of palindromes). Given an integer $d>0$, a $d$-near-palindrome is a string of Hamming distance at most $d$ from its reverse. We study the natural problem of identifying a longest $d$-near-palindrome in data streams. The problem is relevant to the analysis of DNA databases, and to the task of repairing recursive structures in documents such as XML and JSON. We present an algorithm that returns a $d$-near-palindrome whose length is within a multiplicative $(1+ε)$-factor of the longest $d$-near-palindrome. Ou…
Several biological problems require the identification of regions in a sequence where some feature occurs within a target density range: examples including the location of GC-rich regions, identification of CpG islands, and sequence matching. Mathematically, this corresponds to searching a string of 0s and 1s for a substring whose relative proportion of 1s lies between given lower and upper bounds. We consider the algorithmic problem of locating the longest such substring, as well as other related problems (such as finding the shortest substring or a maximal set of disjoint substrings). For lo…
A longest repeat query on a string, motivated by its applications in many subfields including computational biology, asks for the longest repetitive substring(s) covering a particular string position (point query). In this paper, we extend the longest repeat query from point query to \emph{interval query}, allowing the search for longest repeat(s) covering any position interval, and thus significantly improve the usability of the solution. Our method for interval query takes a different approach using the insight from a recent work on \emph{shortest unique substrings} [1], as the prior work's …
We consider the problem of finding, given two documents of total length $n$, a longest string occurring as a substring of both documents. This problem, known as the Longest Common Substring (LCS) problem, has a classic $O(n)$-time solution dating back to the discovery of suffix trees (Weiner, 1973) and their efficient construction for integer alphabets (Farach-Colton, 1997). However, these solutions require $Θ(n)$ space, which is prohibitive in many applications. To address this issue, Starikovskaya and Vildhøj (CPM 2013) showed that for $n^{2/3} \le s \le n^{1-o(1)}$, the LCS problem can be s…
In this paper, we consider a generalized longest common subsequence problem with multiple substring exclusion constrains. For the two input sequences $X$ and $Y$ of lengths $n$ and $m$, and a set of $d$ constrains $P=\{P_1,...,P_d\}$ of total length $r$, the problem is to find a common subsequence $Z$ of $X$ and $Y$ excluding each of constrain string in $P$ as a substring and the length of $Z$ is maximized. The problem was declared to be NP-hard\cite{1}, but we finally found that this is not true. A new dynamic programming solution for this problem is presented in this paper. The correctness o…
Lately, there is a growing interest in dynamic string matching problems. Specifically, the dynamic Longest Common Factor problem has been researched and some interesting results has been reached. In this paper we examine another classic string problem in a dynamic setting - finding the longest palindrome substring of a given string. We show that the longest palindrome can be maintained in poly-logarithmic time per symbol edit.
The similarity between a pair of time series, i.e., sequences of indexed values in time order, is often estimated by the dynamic time warping (DTW) distance, instead of any in the well-studied family of measures including the longest common subsequence (LCS) length and the edit distance. Although it may seem as if the DTW and the LCS(-like) measures are essentially different, we reveal that the DTW distance can be represented by the longest increasing subsequence (LIS) length of a sequence of integers, which is the LCS length between the integer sequence and itself sorted. For a given pair of …
The $k$-mismatch problem consists in computing the Hamming distance between a pattern $P$ of length $m$ and every length-$m$ substring of a text $T$ of length $n$, if this distance is no more than $k$. In many real-world applications, any cyclic rotation of $P$ is a relevant pattern, and thus one is interested in computing the minimal distance of every length-$m$ substring of $T$ and any cyclic rotation of $P$. This is the circular pattern matching with $k$ mismatches ($k$-CPM) problem. A multitude of papers have been devoted to solving this problem but, to the best of our knowledge, only aver…
We revisit the exact shortest unique substring (SUS) finding problem, and propose its approximate version where mismatches are allowed, due to its applications in subfields such as computational biology. We design a generic in-place framework that fits to solve both the exact and approximate $k$-mismatch SUS finding, using the minimum $2n$ memory words plus $n$ bytes space, where $n$ is the input string size. By using the in-place framework, we can find the exact and approximate $k$-mismatch SUS for every string position using a total of $O(n)$ and $O(n^2)$ time, respectively, regardless of th…
The problem of finding a longest common subsequence of two main sequences with some constraint that must be a substring of the result (STR-IC-LCS) was formulated recently. It is a variant of the constrained longest common subsequence problem. As the known algorithms for the STR-IC-LCS problem are cubic-time, the presented quadratic-time algorithm is significantly faster.
Two strings x and y are said to be Abelian equivalent if x is a permutation of y, or vice versa. If a string z satisfies z = xy with x and y being Abelian equivalent, then z is said to be an Abelian square. If a string w can be factorized into a sequence v_1,...,v_s of strings such that v_1 ,..., v_{s-1} are all Abelian equivalent and vs is a substring of a permutation of v_1, then w is said to have a regular Abelian period (p,t) where p = |v_1| and t = |v_s|. If a substring w_1[i..i+l-1] of a string w_1 and a substring w_2[j..j+l-1] of another string w_2 are Abelian equivalent, then the subst…
Given a pattern of length $m$ and a text of length $n$, the goal in $k$-mismatch pattern matching is to compute, for every $m$-substring of the text, the exact Hamming distance to the pattern or report that it exceeds $k$. This can be solved in either $\widetilde{O}(n \sqrt{k})$ time as shown by Amir et al. [J. Algorithms 2004] or $\widetilde{O}((m + k^2) \cdot n/m)$ time due to a result of Clifford et al. [SODA 2016]. We provide a smooth time trade-off between these two bounds by designing an algorithm working in time $\widetilde{O}( (m + k \sqrt{m}) \cdot n/m)$. We complement this with a mat…
Suffix trees are an important data structure at the core of optimal solutions to many fundamental string problems, such as exact pattern matching, longest common substring, matching statistics, and longest repeated substring. Recent lines of research focused on extending some of these problems to vertex-labeled graphs, although using ad-hoc approaches which in some cases do not generalize to all input graphs. In the absence of a ubiquitous tool like the suffix tree for labeled graphs, we introduce the labeled direct product of two graphs as a general tool for obtaining optimal algorithms: we o…
The longest common subsequence (LCS) problem is a central problem in stringology that finds the longest common subsequence of given two strings $A$ and $B$. More recently, a set of four constrained LCS problems (called generalized constrained LCS problem) were proposed by Chen and Chao [J. Comb. Optim, 2011]. In this paper, we consider the substring-excluding constrained LCS (STR-EC-LCS) problem. A string $Z$ is said to be an STR-EC-LCS of two given strings $A$ and $B$ excluding $P$ if, $Z$ is one of the longest common subsequences of $A$ and $B$ that does not contain $P$ as a substring. Wang …
Analyzing patterns in data streams generated by network traffic, sensor networks, or satellite feeds is a challenge for systems in which the available storage is limited. In addition, real data is noisy, which makes designing data stream algorithms even more challenging. Motivated by such challenges, we study algorithms for detecting the similarity of two data streams that can be read in sync. Two strings $S, T\in Σ^n$ form a $d$-near-alignment if the distance between them in some given metric is at most $d$. We study the problem of identifying a longest substring of $S$ and $T$ that forms a $…
Due to the increased availability of large datasets of biological sequences, the tools for sequence comparison are now relying on efficient alignment-free approaches to a greater extent. Most of the alignment-free approaches require the computation of statistics of the sequences in the dataset. Such computations become impractical in internal memory when very large collections of long sequences are considered. In this paper, we present a new conceptual data structure, the colored longest common prefix array (cLCP), that allows to efficiently tackle several problems with an alignment-free appro…
We revisit the problem of finding shortest unique substring (SUS) proposed recently by [6]. We propose an optimal $O(n)$ time and space algorithm that can find an SUS for every location of a string of size $n$. Our algorithm significantly improves the $O(n^2)$ time complexity needed by [6]. We also support finding all the SUSes covering every location, whereas the solution in [6] can find only one SUS for every location. Further, our solution is simpler and easier to implement and can also be more space efficient in practice, since we only use the inverse suffix array and longest common prefix…
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）
In the $k$-mismatch problem we are given a pattern of length $n$ and a text and must find all locations where the Hamming distance between the pattern and the text is at most $k$. A series of recent breakthroughs have resulted in an ultra-efficient streaming algorithm for this problem that requires only $O(k \log \frac{n}{k})$ space and $O(\log \frac{n}{k} (\sqrt{k \log k} + \log^3 n))$ time per letter [Clifford, Kociumaka, Porat, SODA 2019]. In this work, we consider a strictly harder problem called dictionary matching with $k$ mismatches. In this problem, we are given a dictionary of $d$ pat…
In this paper we address the longest common extension (LCE) problem: to compute the length $\ell$ of the longest common prefix between any two suffixes of $T\in Σ^n$ with $ Σ= \{0, \ldots σ-1\} $. We present two fast and space-efficient solutions based on (Karp-Rabin) \textit{fingerprinting} and \textit{sampling}. Our first data structure exploits properties of Mersenne prime numbers when used as moduli of the Karp-Rabin hash function and takes $n\lceil \log_2σ\rceil$ bits of space. Our second structure works with any prime modulus and takes $n\lceil \log_2σ\rceil + n/w + w\log_2 n$ bits of sp…
In this paper, we consider a generalized longest common subsequence problem, in which a constraining sequence of length $s$ must be included as a substring and the other constraining sequence of length $t$ must be excluded as a subsequence of two main sequences and the length of the result must be maximal. For the two input sequences $X$ and $Y$ of lengths $n$ and $m$, and the given two constraining sequences of length $s$ and $t$, we present an $O(nmst)$ time dynamic programming algorithm for solving the new generalized longest common subsequence problem. The time complexity can be reduced fu…
Approximate pattern matching is a natural and well-studied problem on strings: Given a text $T$, a pattern $P$, and a threshold $k$, find (the starting positions of) all substrings of $T$ that are at distance at most $k$ from $P$. We consider the two most fundamental string metrics: the Hamming distance and the edit distance. Under the Hamming distance, we search for substrings of $T$ that have at most $k$ mismatches with $P$, while under the edit distance, we search for substrings of $T$ that can be transformed to $P$ with at most $k$ edits. Exact occurrences of $P$ in $T$ have a very simple …
