Related papers: Hardness and algorithmic results for the approxima…
We study the fundamental problem of finding the best string to represent a given set, in the form of the Closest String problem: Given a set $X \subseteq \Sigma^d$ of $n$ strings, find the string $x^*$ minimizing the radius of the smallest…
We study the approximation hardness of the Shortest Superstring, the Maximal Compression and the Maximum Asymmetric Traveling Salesperson (MAX-ATSP) problem. We introduce a new reduction method that produces strongly restricted instances of…
This paper introduces the \emph{$d$-distance matching problem}, in which we are given a bipartite graph $G=(S,T;E)$ with $S=\{s_1,\dots,s_n\}$, a weight function on the edges and an integer $d\in\mathbb Z_+$. The goal is to find a maximum…
Given a text $T$ of length $n$ and a pattern $P$ of length $m$, the approximate pattern matching problem asks for computation of a particular \emph{distance} function between $P$ and every $m$-substring of $T$. We consider a…
We study the classic Text-to-Pattern Hamming Distances problem: given a pattern $P$ of length $m$ and a text $T$ of length $n$, both over a polynomial-size alphabet, compute the Hamming distance between $P$ and $T[i\, .\, . \, i+m-1]$ for…
The problem of finding \emph{distance} between \emph{pattern} of length $m$ and \emph{text} of length $n$ is a typical way of generalizing pattern matching to incorporate dissimilarity score. For both Hamming and $L_1$ distances only a…
The Cartesian tree of a sequence captures the relative order of the sequence's elements. In recent years, Cartesian tree matching has attracted considerable attention, particularly due to its applications in time series analysis. Consider a…
Parameterized complexity enables the practical solution of generally intractable NP-hard problems when certain parameters are small, making it particularly useful in real-world applications. The study of string problems in this framework…
In this paper we consider the $p$-Norm Hamming Centroid problem which asks to determine whether some given binary strings have a centroid with a bound on the $p$-norm of its Hamming distances to the strings. Specifically, given a set of…
We study the problem of approximating Hamming distance in sublinear time under property-preserving hashing (PPH), where only hashed representations of inputs are available. Building on the threshold evaluation framework of Fleischhacker,…
Here we study the complexity of string problems as a function of the size of a program that generates input. We consider straight-line programs (SLP), since all algorithms on SLP-generated strings could be applied to processing…
We develop a randomized approximation algorithm for the classical maximum coverage problem, which given a list of sets $A_1,A_2,\cdots, A_m$ and integer parameter $k$, select $k$ sets $A_{i_1}, A_{i_2},\cdots, A_{i_k}$ for maximum union…
Ochem, Rampersad, and Shallit gave various examples of infinite words avoiding what they called approximate repetitions. An approximate repetition is a factor of the form xx', where x and x' are close to being identical. In their work, they…
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…
Given a set of strings over a specified alphabet, identifying a median or consensus string that minimizes the total distance to all input strings is a fundamental data aggregation problem. When the Hamming distance is considered as the…
A covering code is a set of codewords with the property that the union of balls, suitably defined, around these codewords covers an entire space. Generally, the goal is to find the covering code with the minimum size codebook. While most…
For numerous graph problems in the realm of parameterized algorithms, using the size of a smallest deletion set (called a modulator) into well-understood graph families as parameterization has led to a long and successful line of research.…
Given a collection S of subsets of some set U, and M a subset of U, the set cover problem is to find the smallest subcollection C of S such that M is a subset of the union of the sets in C. While the general problem is NP-hard to solve,…
In COCOA 2015, Korman et al. studied the following geometric covering problem: given a set $S$ of $n$ line segments in the plane, find a minimum number of line segments such that every cell in the arrangement of the line segments is…
The Acceptance Probability Estimation Problem (APEP) is to additively approximate the acceptance probability of a Boolean circuit. This problem admits a probabilistic approximation scheme. A central question is whether we can design a…