Related papers: Breaking the Variance: Approximating the Hamming D…
A $(1 \pm \epsilon)$-sparsifier of a hypergraph $G(V,E)$ is a (weighted) subgraph that preserves the value of every cut to within a $(1 \pm \epsilon)$-factor. It is known that every hypergraph with $n$ vertices admits a $(1 \pm…
The problem of constructing optimal factoring automata arises in the context of unification factoring for the efficient execution of logic programs. Given an ordered set of $n$ strings of length $m$, the problem is to construct a trie-like…
The deviation of the observed frequency of a word $w$ from its expected frequency in a given sequence $x$ is used to determine whether or not the word is avoided. This concept is particularly useful in DNA linguistic analysis. The value of…
The edit distance is a fundamental measure of sequence similarity, defined as the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions needed to transform one string into the other. Given two strings of length at most $n$,…
We study the approximability of two related problems on graphs with $n$ nodes and $m$ edges: $n$-Pairs Shortest Paths ($n$-PSP), where the goal is to find a shortest path between $O(n)$ prespecified pairs, and All Node Shortest Cycles…
We study the sparse phase retrieval problem, which seeks to recover a sparse signal from a limited set of magnitude-only measurements. In contrast to prevalent sparse phase retrieval algorithms that primarily use first-order methods, we…
Classic similarity measures of strings are longest common subsequence and Levenshtein distance (i.e., the classic edit distance). A classic similarity measure of curves is dynamic time warping. These measures can be computed by simple…
The Fr\'echet distance is a commonly used distance measure for curves. Computing the Fr\'echet distance between two polygonal curves of $n$ vertices takes roughly quadratic time, and conditional lower bounds suggest that approximating to…
The sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform is one of the central techniques in dimensionality reduction. It supports embedding a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ into $m=O(\varepsilon^{-2} \lg n)$ dimensions while preserving all pairwise…
Random graph matching refers to recovering the underlying vertex correspondence between two random graphs with correlated edges; a prominent example is when the two random graphs are given by Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi graphs $G(n,\frac{d}{n})$.…
In the field of topological data analysis, persistence modules are used to express geometrical features of data sets. The matching distance $d_\mathcal{M}$ measures the difference between $2$-parameter persistence modules by taking the…
In the $k$-Edit Circular Pattern Matching ($k$-Edit CPM) problem, we are given a length-$n$ text $T$, a length-$m$ pattern $P$, and a positive integer threshold $k$, and we are to report all starting positions of the substrings of $T$ that…
Given a redundant dictionary $\Phi$, represented by an $M \times N$ matrix ($\Phi \in \mathbb{R}^{M \times N}$) and a target signal $y \in \mathbb{R}^M$, the \emph{sparse approximation problem} asks to find an approximate representation of…
We study a generalization of the recently introduced order-preserving pattern matching, where instead of looking for an exact copy of the pattern, we only require that the relative order between the elements is the same. In our variant, we…
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…
Given a set of pattern strings $\mathcal{P}=\{P_1, P_2,\ldots P_k\}$ and a text string $S$, the classic dictionary matching problem is to report all occurrences of each pattern in $S$. We study the dictionary problem in the compressed…
The 2-Wasserstein distance (or RMS distance) is a useful measure of similarity between probability distributions that has exciting applications in machine learning. For discrete distributions, the problem of computing this distance can be…
We present a new algorithm for finding a near optimal low-rank approximation of a matrix $A$ in $O(nnz(A))$ time. Our method is based on a recursive sampling scheme for computing a representative subset of $A$'s columns, which is then used…
The diameter of a graph is one if its most important parameters, being used in many real-word applications. In particular, the diameter dictates how fast information can spread throughout data and communication networks. Thus, it is a…
Feature hashing, also known as {\em the hashing trick}, introduced by Weinberger et al. (2009), is one of the key techniques used in scaling-up machine learning algorithms. Loosely speaking, feature hashing uses a random sparse projection…