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Assembling a gene from candidate exons is an important problem in computational biology. Among the most successful approaches to this problem is \emph{spliced alignment}, proposed by Gelfand et al., which scores different candidate exon…
We show that computing the interleaving distance between two multi-graded persistence modules is NP-hard. More precisely, we show that deciding whether two modules are $1$-interleaved is NP-complete, already for bigraded, interval…
Biharmonic distance (\bd) is a powerful graph distance metric with many applications, including identifying critical links in road networks and mitigating over-squashing problem in \gnn. However, computing \bd\ is extremely difficult,…
We present an algorithm for approximating the edit distance $\operatorname{ed}(x, y)$ between two strings $x$ and $y$ in time parameterized by the degree to which one of the strings $x$ satisfies a natural pseudorandomness property. The…
Discrete Morse theory has emerged as a powerful tool for a wide range of problems, including the computation of (persistent) homology. In this context, discrete Morse theory is used to reduce the problem of computing a topological invariant…
Trace reconstruction considers the task of recovering an unknown string $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ given a number of independent "traces", i.e., subsequences of $x$ obtained by randomly and independently deleting every symbol of $x$ with some…
We consider the numerical taxonomy problem of fitting a positive distance function ${D:{S\choose 2}\rightarrow \mathbb R_{>0}}$ by a tree metric. We want a tree $T$ with positive edge weights and including $S$ among the vertices so that…
An RNA sequence is a word over an alphabet on four elements $\{A,C,G,U\}$ called bases. RNA sequences fold into secondary structures where some bases match one another while others remain unpaired. Pseudoknot-free secondary structures can…
The Closest String Problem is an NP-hard problem that aims to find a string that has the minimum distance from all sequences that belong to the given set of strings. Its applications can be found in coding theory, computational biology, and…
Given a graph where every vertex has exactly one labeled token, how can we most quickly execute a given permutation on the tokens? In (sequential) token swapping, the goal is to use the shortest possible sequence of swaps, each of which…
The (combinatorial) diameter of a polytope $P \subseteq \mathbb R^d$ is the maximum value of a shortest path between a pair of vertices on the 1-skeleton of $P$, that is the graph where the nodes are given by the $0$-dimensional faces of…
Finding an Approximate Longest Common Substring (ALCS) within a given set $S=\{s_1,s_2,\ldots,s_m\}$ of $m \ge 2$ strings is a key problem in computational biology, such as identifying related mutations across multiple genetic sequences. We…
The tree edit distance (TED) between two rooted ordered trees with $n$ nodes labeled from an alphabet $\Sigma$ is the minimum cost of transforming one tree into the other by a sequence of valid operations consisting of insertions, deletions…
Emphatic Temporal Difference (TD) methods are a class of off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods involving the use of followon traces. Despite the theoretical success of emphatic TD methods in addressing the notorious deadly triad of…
Centromeres are essential for chromosome segregation, yet their DNA sequences evolve rapidly. In most animals and plants that have been studied, centromeres contain megabase-scale arrays of tandem repeats. Despite their importance, very…
The approximate string matching is a fundamental and recurrent problem that arises in most computer science fields. This problem can be defined as follows: Let $D=\{x_1,x_2,\ldots x_d\}$ be a set of $d$ words defined on an alphabet…
We describe a kernel of size 9k-8 for the NP-hard problem of computing the Tree Bisection and Reconnect (TBR) distance k between two unrooted binary phylogenetic trees. We achieve this by extending the existing portfolio of reduction rules…
We consider the approximate pattern matching problem under edit distance. In this problem we are given a pattern $P$ of length $w$ and a text $T$ of length $n$ over some alphabet $\Sigma$, and a positive integer $k$. The goal is to find all…
The edit distance between two rooted ordered trees with $n$ nodes labeled from an alphabet~$\Sigma$ is the minimum cost of transforming one tree into the other by a sequence of elementary operations consisting of deleting and relabeling…
Let $S$ and $D$ each be a set of orthogonal line segments in the plane. A line segment $s\in S$ \emph{stabs} a line segment $s'\in D$ if $s\cap s'\neq\emptyset$. It is known that the problem of stabbing the line segments in $D$ with the…