The expected length of longest common subsequences is a problem that has been in the literature for at least twenty five years. Determining the limiting constants γ_k appears to be quite difficult, and the current best bounds leave much room for improvement. Boutet de Monvel explores an independent version of the problem he calls the Bernoulli Matching model. He explores this problem and its relation to the longest common subsequence problem. This paper continues this pursuit by focusing on a simplification we term r-reach. For the string model, L_r(u,v) is the longest common subsequence of u and v given that each matched pair of letters is no more than r letters apart.
We compute the limit distribution for (centered and scaled) length of the longest increasing subsequence of random colored permutations. The limit distribution function is a power of that for usual random permutations computed recently by Baik, Deift, and Johansson (math.CO/9810105). In two--colored case our method provides a different proof of a similar result by Tracy and Widom about longest increasing subsequences of signed permutations (math.CO/9811154). Our main idea is to reduce the `colored' problem to the case of usual random permutations using certain combinatorial results and element…
We consider the length L of the longest common subsequence of two randomly uniformly and independently chosen n character words over a k-ary alphabet. Subadditivity arguments yield that the expected value of L, when normalized by n, converges to a constant C_k. We prove a conjecture of Sankoff and Mainville from the early 80's claiming that C_k\sqrt{k} goes to 2 as k goes to infinity.
Given two random finite sequences from $[k]^n$ such that a prefix of the first sequence is a suffix of the second, we examine the length of their longest common subsequence. If $\ell$ is the length of the overlap, we prove that the expected length of an LCS is approximately $\max(\ell, \mathbb{E}[L_n])$, where $L_n$ is the length of an LCS between two independent random sequences. We also obtain tail bounds on this quantity.
We show that a wide variety of generalized increasing subsequence problems admit a one parameter family of extensions for which we can exactly compute the mean length of the longest increasing subsequence. By the nature of the extension, this gives upper bounds on the mean in the unextended model, which turn out to be asymptotically tight for all of the models that have so far been analyzed. A heuristic analysis based on this fact gives not just the asymptotic mean but also the asymptotic scale factor, again agreeing with all known cases.
We consider the expected length of the longest common subsequence between two random words of lengths $n$ and $(1-\varepsilon)kn$ over $k$-symbol alphabet. It is well-known that this quantity is asymptotic to $γ_{k,\varepsilon} n$ for some constant $γ_{k,\varepsilon}$. We show that $γ_{k,\varepsilon}$ is of the order $1-c\varepsilon^2$ uniformly in $k$ and $\varepsilon$. In addition, for large $k$, we give evidence that $γ_{k,\varepsilon}$ approaches $1-\tfrac{1}{4}\varepsilon^2$, and prove a matching lower bound.
The Mallows measure is measure on permutations which was introduced by Mallows in connection with ranking problems in statistics. Under this measure, the probability of a permutation $π$ is proportional to $q^{Inv(π)}$ where $q$ is a positive parameter and $Inv(π)$ is the number of inversions in $π$. We consider the length of the longest common subsequence (LCS) of two independently permutations drawn according to $μ_{n,q}$ and $μ_{n,q'}$ for some $q,q' >0$. We show that when $0<q,q'<1$, the limiting law of the LCS is Gaussian. In the regime that $n(1-q) \to \infty$ and $n(1-q') \to \infty$ we…
The Mallows measure is a probability measure on $S_n$ where the probability of a permutation $π$ is proportional to $q^{l(π)}$ with $q > 0$ being a parameter and $l(π)$ the number of inversions in $π$. We prove a weak law of large numbers for the length of the longest common subsequences of two independent permutations drawn from the Mallows measure, when $q$ is a function of $n$ and $n(1-q)$ has limit in $\mathbb{R}$ as $n \to \infty$.
Let $LA_{n}(τ)$ be the length of the longest alternating subsequence of a uniform random permutation $τ\in[n]$. Classical probabilistic arguments are used to rederive the asymptotic mean, variance and limiting law of $LA_{n}(τ)$. Our methodology is robust enough to tackle similar problems for finite alphabet random words or even Markovian sequences in which case our results are mainly original. A sketch of how some cases of pattern restricted permutations can also be tackled with probabilistic methods is finally presented.
Let $(X_i)_{i \geq 1}$ and $(Y_i)_{i\geq1}$ be two independent sequences of independent identically distributed random variables taking their values in a common finite alphabet and having the same law. Let $LC_n$ be the length of the longest common subsequences of the two random words $X_1\cdots X_n$ and $Y_1\cdots Y_n$. Under a lower bound assumption on the order of its variance, $LC_n$ is shown to satisfy a central limit theorem. This is in contrast to the limiting distribution of the length of the longest common subsequences in two independent uniform random permutations of $\{1, \dots, n\}…
We investigate the asymptotic standard deviation of the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) of two independent i.i.d. sequences of length n. The first sequence is drawn from a three letter alphabet {0,1,a}, whilst the second sequence is binary. The main result of this article is that in this asymmetric case, the standard deviation of the length of the LCS is of order square root of n. This confirms Waterman's conjecture for this special case. Our result seems to indicate that in many other situations the order of the standard deviation is also square root of n.
The nature of the alignment with gaps corresponding to a longest common subsequence (LCS) of two independent iid random sequences drawn from a finite alphabet is investigated. It is shown that such an optimal alignment typically matches pieces of similar short-length. This is of importance in understanding the structure of optimal alignments of two sequences. Moreover, it is also shown that any property, common to two subsequences, typically holds in most parts of the optimal alignment whenever this same property holds, with high probability, for strings of similar short-length. Our results sh…
Introduced by Mallows in statistical ranking theory, Mallows permutation model is a class of non-uniform probability measures on the symmetric group $S_n$ that depend on a distance metric $d(σ,τ)$ on $S_n$ and a scale parameter $β$. Taking the distance metric to be the $L^1$ and $L^2$ distances--which are respectively known as Spearman's footrule and Spearman's rank correlation in the statistics literature--leads to Mallows permutation models with $L^1$ and $L^2$ distances. In this paper, we study the length of the longest increasing subsequence of random permutations drawn from Mallows permut…
Connections between longest increasing subsequences in random permutations and eigenvalues of random matrices with complex entries have been intensely studied. This note applies properties of random elements of the finite general linear group to obtain results about the longest increasing subsequence in non- uniform random permutations.
We study the length of the longest increasing and longest decreasing subsequences of random permutations drawn from the Mallows measure. Under this measure, the probability of a permutation pi in S_n is proportional to q^{inv(pi)} where q is a real parameter and inv(pi) is the number of inversions in pi. The case q=1 corresponds to uniformly random permutations. The Mallows measure was introduced by Mallows in connection with ranking problems in statistics. We determine the typical order of magnitude of the lengths of the longest increasing and decreasing subsequences, as well as large deviati…
This is a commentary on the article: David Aldous and Persi Diaconis, Longest increasing subsequences: from patience sorting to the Baik-Deift-Johansson theorem, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 36 (1999), no. 4, 413-432.
We define and study the Plancherel-Hecke probability measure on Young diagrams; the Hecke algorithm of [Buch-Kresch-Shimozono-Tamvakis-Yong '06] is interpreted as a polynomial-time exact sampling algorithm for this measure. Using the results of [Thomas-Yong '07] on jeu de taquin for increasing tableaux, a symmetry property of the Hecke algorithm is proved, in terms of longest strictly increasing/decreasing subsequences of words. This parallels classical theorems of [Schensted '61] and of [Knuth '70], respectively, on the Schensted and Robinson-Schensted-Knuth algorithms. We investigate, and co…
The longest increasing subsequence of a random walk with mean zero and finite variance is known to be $n^{1/2 + o(1)}$. We show that this is not universal for symmetric random walks. In particular, the symmetric Ultra-fat tailed random walk has a longest increasing subsequence that is asymptotically at least $n^{0.690}$ and at most $n^{0.815}$. An exponent strictly greater than $1/2$ is also shown for the symmetric stable-$α$ distribution when $α$ is sufficiently small.
Given two {0,1}-sequences X and Y of lengths m and n, respectively, we write L(X,Y) to denote the length of the longest common subsequence (LCS) of X and Y, and write L(m,n) to denote the expected value of L(X,Y) when X and Y are random sequences. We study the value of the function z -> lim L(nz,n)/n (as n -> infinity) and the relation of this function to the outstanding problem of computing the Chvatal-Sankoff constant lim L(n,n)/n.
The length of the longest common subsequences (LCSs) is often used as a similarity measurement to compare two (or more) random words. Below we study its statistical behavior in mean and variance using a Monte-Carlo approach from which we then develop a hypothesis testing method for sequences similarity. Finally, theoretical upper bounds are obtained for the Chvátal-Sankoff constant of multiple sequences.
The problem of the fluctuation of the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) of two i.i.d. sequences of length $n>0$ has been open for decades. There exist contradicting conjectures on the topic. Chvatal and Sankoff conjectured in 1975 that asymptotically the order should be $n^{2/3}$, while Waterman conjectured in 1994 that asymptotically the order should be $n$. A contiguous substring consisting only of one type of symbol is called a block. In the present work, we determine the order of the fluctuation of the LCS for a special model of sequences consisting of i.i.d. blocks whose lengths are unifor…
We address a question and a conjecture on the expected length of the longest common subsequences of two i.i.d.$\ $random permutations of $[n]:=\{1,2,...,n\}$. The question is resolved by showing that the minimal expectation is not attained in the uniform case. The conjecture asserts that $\sqrt{n}$ is a lower bound on this expectation, but we only obtain $\sqrt[3]{n}$ for it.
Let $X_1, X_2, ..., X_n, ... $ be a sequence of iid random variables with values in a finite alphabet $\{1,...,m\}$. Let $LI_n$ be the length of the longest increasing subsequence of $X_1, X_2, ..., X_n.$ We express the limiting distribution of $LI_n$ as functionals of $m$ and $(m-1)$-dimensional Brownian motions. These expressions are then related to similar functionals appearing in queueing theory, allowing us to further establish asymptotic behaviors as $m$ grows. The finite alphabet results are then used to treat the countable (infinite) alphabet.
Let $(X, Y) = (X_n, Y_n)_{n \geq 1}$ be the output process generated by a hidden chain $Z = (Z_n)_{n \geq 1}$, where $Z$ is a finite state, aperiodic, time homogeneous, and irreducible Markov chain. Let $LC_n$ be the length of the longest common subsequences of $X_1, \ldots, X_n$ and $Y_1, \ldots, Y_n$. Under a mixing hypothesis, a rate of convergence result is obtained for $\mathbb{E}[LC_n]/n$.
We investigate the order of the $r$-th, $1\le r < +\infty$, central moment of the length of the longest common subsequence of two independent random words of size $n$ whose letters are identically distributed and independently drawn from a finite alphabet. When all but one of the letters are drawn with small probabilities, which depend on the size of the alphabet, a lower bound is shown to be of order $n^{r/2}$. This result complements a generic upper bound also of order $n^{r/2}$.
We investigate the variance of the length of the longest common subsequences of two independent random words of size $n$, where the letters of one word are i.i.d. uniformly drawn from $\{α_1, α_2, \cdots, α_m\}$, while the letters of the other word are i.i.d. drawn from $\{α_1, α_2, \cdots, α_m, α_{m+1}\}$, with probability $p > 0$ to be $α_{m+1}$, and $(1-p)/m > 0$ for all the other letters. The order of the variance of this length is shown to be linear in $n$.
We present equalities in law between the spectra of the minors of a GUE matrix and some maximal functionals of independent Brownian motions. In turn, these results allow to recover the limiting shape (properly centered and scaled) of the RSK Young diagrams associated with a random word as a function of the spectra of these minors. Since the length of the top row of the diagrams is the length of the longest increasing subsequence of the random word, the corresponding limiting law also follows.
Let $X=(X_i)_{i\ge 1}$ and $Y=(Y_i)_{i\ge 1}$ be two sequences of independent and identically distributed (iid) random variables taking their values, uniformly, in a common totally ordered finite alphabet. Let LCI$_n$ be the length of the longest common and (weakly) increasing subsequence of $X_1\cdots X_n$ and $Y_1\cdots Y_n$. As $n$ grows without bound, and when properly centered and normalized, LCI$_n$ is shown to converge, in distribution, towards a Brownian functional that we identify.
The Preisach graph is a directed graph associated with a permutation $ρ\in{\cal S}_N$. We give an explicit bijection between its vertices and increasing subsequences of $ρ$ with the property that the length of a subsequence equals to the degree of nesting of the corresponding vertex inside a hierarchy of cycles and sub-cycles of the graph. As a consequence, the nesting degree of the Preisach graph equals the length of the longest increasing subsequence.
We study the lengths of monotone subsequences for permutations drawn from the Mallows measure. The Mallows measure was introduced by Mallows in connection with ranking problems in statistics. Under this measure, the probability of a permutation $π$ is proportional to $q^{{\rm inv}(π)}$ where $q$ is a positive parameter and ${\rm inv}(π)$ is the number of inversions in $π$. In our main result we show that when $0<q<1$, the limiting distribution of the longest increasing subsequence (LIS) is Gaussian, answering an open question in [Bhatnagar and Peled, PTRF, 2015]. This is in contrast to the cas…
Let $(X_n)_{n\ge 0}$ be an irreducible, aperiodic, and homogeneous binary Markov chain and let $LI_n$ be the length of the longest (weakly) increasing subsequence of $(X_k)_{1\le k \le n}$. Using combinatorial constructions and weak invariance principles, we present elementary arguments leading to a new proof that (after proper centering and scaling) the limiting law of $LI_n$ is the maximal eigenvalue of a $2 \times 2$ Gaussian random matrix. In fact, the limiting shape of the RSK Young diagrams associated with the binary Markov random word is the spectrum of this random matrix.
We study the shape of the Young diagram λassociated via the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth algorithm to a random permutation in S_n such that the length of the longest decreasing subsequence is not bigger than a fixed number d; in other words we study the restriction of the Plancherel measure to Young diagrams with at most d rows. We prove that in the limit n\to\infty the rows of λbehave like the eigenvalues of a certain random matrix (traceless Gaussian Unitary Ensemble) with d rows and columns. In particular, the length of the longest increasing subsequence of such a random permutation behaves asy…
Let $L_n$ be the length of the longest common subsequence of two independent i.i.d. sequences of Bernoulli variables of length $n$. We prove that the order of the standard deviation of $L_n$ is $\sqrt{n}$, provided the parameter of the Bernoulli variables is small enough. This validates Waterman's conjecture in this situation [Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. B 344 (1994) 383--390]. The order conjectured by Chvatal and Sankoff [J. Appl. Probab. 12 (1975) 306--315], however, is different.
We study the fluctuations, in the large deviations regime, of the longest increasing subsequence of a random i.i.d. sample on the unit square. In particular, our results yield the precise upper and lower exponential tails for the length of the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation.
Let $(X_k)_{k\geq 1}$ and $(Y_k)_{k\geq 1}$ be two independent sequences of i.i.d. random variables, with values in a finite and totally ordered alphabet $\mathcal{A}_m:=\{1,\dots,m\}$, and having respective probability mass function $p^X_1,\dots,p^X_m$ and $p^Y_1,\dots,p^Y_m$. Let $LCI_n$ be the length of the longest common and weakly increasing subsequences in $(X_1,...,X_n)$ and $(Y_1,...,Y_n)$. Once properly centered and normalized, $LCI_n$ is shown to have a limiting distribution which is expressed as a functional of two independent multidimensional Brownian motions.
Consider two independent random strings having same length and taking values uniformly in a common finite alphabet. We study the order of the variance of the length of the longest common subsequences (LCS) of these strings when long blocks, or other types of atypical substrings, are sparsely added into one of them. Under weak conditions on the derivative of the mean LCS-curve, the order of the variance of the LCS is shown to be linear in the length of the strings. We also argue that our proofs carry over to many models used by computational biologists to simulate DNA-sequences. This is the fir…
We consider the distributions of the lengths of the longest weakly increasing and strongly decreasing subsequences in words of length N from an alphabet of k letters. We find Toeplitz determinant representations for the exponential generating functions (on N) of these distribution functions and show that they are expressible in terms of solutions of Painlevé V equations. We show further that in the weakly increasing case the generating function gives the distribution of the smallest eigenvalue in the k x k Laguerre random matrix ensemble and that the distribution itself has, after centering an…
The rate of convergence of the distribution of the length of the longest increasing subsequence, toward the maximal eigenvalue of certain matrix ensembles, is investigated. For finite-alphabet uniform and nonuniform i.i.d. sources, a rate of $\log n/\sqrt{n}$ is obtained. The uniform binary case is further explored, and an improved $1/\sqrt{n}$ rate obtained.
The Mallows measure on the symmetric group $S_n$ is the probability measure such that each permutation has probability proportional to $q$ raised to the power of the number of inversions, where $q$ is a positive parameter and the number of inversions of $π$ is equal to the number of pairs $i<j$ such that $π_i > π_j$. We prove a weak law of large numbers for the length of the longest increasing subsequence for Mallows distributed random permutations, in the limit that $n$ tends to infinity and $q$ tends to 1 in such a way that $n(1-q)$ has a limit in $\R$.
We provide a framework for proving convergence to the directed landscape, the central object in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class. For last passage models, we show that compact convergence to the Airy line ensemble implies convergence to the Airy sheet. In i.i.d. environments, we show that Airy sheet convergence implies convergence of distances and geodesics to their counterparts in the directed landscape. Our results imply convergence of classical last passage models and interacting particle systems. Our framework is built on the notion of a directed metric, a generalization of metri…
A random $n$-permutation may be generated by sequentially removing random cards $C_1,...,C_n$ from an $n$-card deck $D = \{1,...,n\}$. The permutation $σ$ is simply the sequence of cards in the order they are removed. This permutation is itself uniformly random, as long as each random card $C_t$ is drawn uniformly from the remaining set at time $t$. We consider, here, a variant of this simple procedure in which one is given a choice between $k$ random cards from the remaining set at each step, and selects the lowest numbered of these for removal. This induces a bias towards selecting lower num…
Considered are the large $N$, or large intensity, forms of the distribution of the length of the longest increasing subsequences for various models. Earlier work has established that after centring and scaling, the limit laws for these distributions relate to certain distribution functions at the hard edge known from random matrix theory. By analysing the hard to soft edge transition, we supplement and extend results of Baik and Jenkins for the Hammersley model and symmetrisations, which give that the leading correction is proportional to $z^{-2/3}$, where $z^2$ is the intensity of the Poisson…
We provide Monte Carlo estimates of the scaling of the length $L_{n}$ of the longest increasing subsequences of $n$-steps random walks for several different distributions of step lengths, short and heavy-tailed. Our simulations indicate that, barring possible logarithmic corrections, $L_{n} \sim n^θ$ with the leading scaling exponent $0.60 \lesssim θ\lesssim 0.69$ for the heavy-tailed distributions of step lengths examined, with values increasing as the distribution becomes more heavy-tailed, and $θ\simeq 0.57$ for distributions of finite variance, irrespective of the particular distribution. …
Recently Richard Stanley initiated a study of the distribution of the length as(w) of the longest alternating subsequence in a random permutation w from the symmetric group $S_n$. Among other things he found an explicit formula for the generating function (on n and k) for the probability that as(w) is at most k and conjectured that the distribution, suitably centered and normalized, tended to a Gaussian with variance 8/45. In this note we present a proof of the conjecture based on the generating function.
Consider two random strings having the same length and generated by an iid sequence taking its values uniformly in a fixed finite alphabet. Artificially place a long constant block into one of the strings, where a constant block is a contiguous substring consisting only of one type of symbol. The long block replaces a segment of equal size and its length is smaller than the length of the strings, but larger than its square-root. We show that for sufficiently long strings the optimal alignment corresponding to a Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) treats the inserted block very differently dependi…
The longest increasing subsequence (LIS) of a sequence of correlated random variables is a basic quantity with potential applications that has started to receive proper attention only recently. Here we investigate the behavior of the length of the LIS of the so-called symmetric ultra-fat tailed random walk, introduced earlier in an abstract setting in the mathematical literature. After explicit constructing the ultra-fat tailed random walk, we found numerically that the expected length $L_{n}$ of its LIS scales with the length $n$ of the walk like $\langle L_{n} \rangle \sim n^{0.716}$, indica…
We numerically estimate the leading asymptotic behavior of the length $L_{n}$ of the longest increasing subsequence of random walks with step increments following Student's $t$-distribution with parameter in the range $1/2 \leq ν\leq 5$. We find that the expected value $\mathbb{E}(L_{n}) \sim n^θ\ln{n}$ with $θ$ decreasing from $θ(ν=1/2) \approx 0.70$ to $θ(ν\geq 5/2) \approx 0.50$. For random walks with distribution of step increments of finite variance ($ν> 2$), this confirms previous observation of $\mathbb{E}(L_{n}) \sim \sqrt{n}\ln{n}$ to leading order. We note that this asymptotic behavi…
It is known from the work of Baik, Deift, and Johansson [1999] that we have Tracy-Widom fluctuations for the longest increasing subsequence of uniform permutations. In this paper, we prove that this result holds also in the case of the Ewens distribution and more generally for a class of random permutation with distribution invariant under conjugation. Moreover, we obtain the convergence of the first components of the associated Young tableaux to the Airy Ensemble as well as the global convergence to the Vershik-Kerov-Logan-Shepp shape. Using similar techniques, we also prove that the limiting…
