Related papers: Edit Distance in Near-Linear Time: it's a Constant…

The Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) is a fundamental string similarity measure, and computing the LCS of two strings is a classic algorithms question. A textbook dynamic programming algorithm gives an exact algorithm in quadratic time, and…

Analyzing patterns in data streams generated by network traffic, sensor networks, or satellite feeds is a challenge for systems in which the available storage is limited. In addition, real data is noisy, which makes designing data stream…

We give an algorithm which for an input planar graph $G$ of $n$ vertices and integer $k$, in $\min\{O(n\log^3n),O(nk^2)\}$ time either constructs a branch-decomposition of $G$ with width at most $(2+\delta)k$, $\delta>0$ is a constant, or a…

Dynamic time warping distance (DTW) is a widely used distance measure between time series. The best known algorithms for computing DTW run in near quadratic time, and conditional lower bounds prohibit the existence of significantly faster…

The Fr\'echet distance is a commonly used similarity measure between curves. It is known how to compute the continuous Fr\'echet distance between two polylines with $m$ and $n$ vertices in $\mathbb{R}^d$ in $O(mn (\log \log n)^2)$ time;…

We resolve a long-standing open question, about the existence of a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the average-case \textsc{Decision Tree} problem with uniform probability distribution over the hypotheses. We answer the question…

The algorithmic tasks of computing the Hamming distance between a given pattern of length $m$ and each location in a text of length $n$ is one of the most fundamental algorithmic tasks in string algorithms. Unfortunately, there is evidence…

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…

For any two point sets $A,B \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ of size up to $n$, the Chamfer distance from $A$ to $B$ is defined as $\text{CH}(A,B)=\sum_{a \in A} \min_{b \in B} d_X(a,b)$, where $d_X$ is the underlying distance measure (e.g., the…

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…

String Edit Distance is a more-than-classical problem whose behavior in the dynamic setting, where the strings are updated over time, is well studied. A single-character substitution, insertion, or deletion can be processed in time…

We study the classical approximate string matching problem, that is, given strings $P$ and $Q$ and an error threshold $k$, find all ending positions of substrings of $Q$ whose edit distance to $P$ is at most $k$. Let $P$ and $Q$ have…

We study the problem of edit similarity joins, where given a set of strings and a threshold value $K$, we want to output all pairs of strings whose edit distances are at most $K$. Edit similarity join is a fundamental problem in data…

The tree edit distance is a natural dissimilarity measure between rooted ordered trees whose nodes are labeled over an alphabet $\Sigma$. It is defined as the minimum number of node edits (insertions, deletions, and relabelings) required to…

We consider the classic problem of computing the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) of two strings of length $n$. While a simple quadratic algorithm has been known for the problem for more than 40 years, no faster algorithm has been found…

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a widely used similarity measure for comparing strings that encode time series data, with applications to areas including bioinformatics, signature verification, and speech recognition. The standard…

Dot plots are a standard method for local comparison of biological sequences. In a dot plot, a substring to substring distance is computed for all pairs of fixed-size windows in the input strings. Commonly, the Hamming distance is used…

Several measures exist for string similarity, including notable ones like the edit distance and the indel distance. The former measures the count of insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into another,…

This paper investigates the approximability of the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) problem. The fastest algorithm for solving the LCS problem exactly runs in essentially quadratic time in the length of the input, and it is known that under…

Longest common subsequence ($\mathsf{LCS}$) is a classic and central problem in combinatorial optimization. While $\mathsf{LCS}$ admits a quadratic time solution, recent evidence suggests that solving the problem may be impossible in truly…