A degenerate symbol x* over an alphabet A is a non-empty subset of A, and a sequence of such symbols is a degenerate string. A degenerate string is said to be conservative if its number of non-solid symbols is upper-bounded by a fixed positive constant k. We consider here the matching problem of conservative degenerate strings and present the first linear-time algorithm that can find, for given degenerate strings P* and T* of total length n containing k non-solid symbols in total, the occurrences of P* in T* in O(nk) time.
@article{arxiv.1506.04559,
title = {Linear Algorithm for Conservative Degenerate Pattern Matching},
author = {Maxime Crochemore and Costas S. Iliopoulos and Ritu Kundu and Manal Mohamed and Fatima Vayani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.04559},
year = {2015}
}