Related papers: The Edit Distance to $k$-Subsequence Universality
Given a context free language $\mathcal{L(G)}$ over alphabet $\Sigma$ and a string $s \in \Sigma^*$, {\em the language edit distance} problem seeks the minimum number of edits (insertions, deletions and substitutions) required to convert…
A supersequence over a finite set is a sequence that contains as subsequence all permutations of the set. This paper defines an infinite array of methods to create supersequences of decreasing lengths. This yields the shortest known…
Given two strings of length $n$ over alphabet $\Sigma$, and an upper bound $k$ on their edit distance, the algorithm of Myers (Algorithmica'86) and Landau and Vishkin (JCSS'88) computes the unweighted string edit distance in…
Edit distance is a measure of similarity of two strings based on the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. The edit distance can be computed exactly using a…
Let $W$ be a string of length $n$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$, $k$ be a positive integer, and $\mathcal{S}$ be a set of length-$k$ substrings of $W$. The ETFS problem asks us to construct a string $X_{\mathrm{ED}}$ such that: (i) no string of…
Universal hitting sets are sets of words that are unavoidable: every long enough sequence is hit by the set (i.e., it contains a word from the set). There is a tight relationship between universal hitting sets and minimizers schemes, where…
Given a subset of size $k$ of a very large universe a randomized way to find this subset could consist of deleting half of the universe and then searching the remaining part. With a probability of $2^{-k}$ one will succeed. By probability…
The complexity function of an infinite word $w$ on a finite alphabet $A$ is the sequence counting, for each non-negative $n$, the number of words of length $n$ on the alphabet $A$ that are factors of the infinite word $w$. The goal of this…
A universal word (u-word) for $d$-dimensional permutations of length $n$ is a 2-dimensional word with $d-1$ rows, any size $n$ window of which is order-isomorphic to exactly one permutation of length $n$, and all permutations of length $n$…
We consider words $w$ over the alphabet $\Sigma=\{0,1,2\}$. It is shown that there are irreducibly square-free words of all lengths $n$ except 4,5,7 and 12. Such a word is square-free (i.e., it has no repetitions $uu$ as factors), but by…
The edit distance is a way of quantifying how similar two strings are to one another by counting the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. In this paper we…
The edit distance between two strings is defined as the smallest number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions that need to be made to transform one of the strings to another one. Approximating edit distance in subquadratic time is…
The edit distance (a.k.a. the Levenshtein distance) between two strings is defined as the minimum number of insertions, deletions or substitutions of symbols needed to transform one string into another. The problem of computing the edit…
We consider the length L of the longest common subsequence of two randomly uniformly and independently chosen n character words over a k-ary alphabet. Subadditivity arguments yield that the expected value of L, when normalized by n,…
Simon's congruence $\sim_k$ is defined as follows: two words are $\sim_k$-equivalent if they have the same set of subsequences of length at most $k$. We propose an algorithm which computes, given two words $s$ and $t$, the largest $k$ for…
We consider the number of occurrences of subwords (non-consecutive sub-sequences) in a given word. We first define the notion of subword entropy of a given word that measures the maximal number of occurrences among all possible subwords. We…
In combinatorics on words, a word $w$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is said to avoid a pattern $p$ over an alphabet $\Delta$ if there is no factor $f$ of $w$ such that $f= (p)$ where $h: \Delta^*\to\Sigma^*$ is a non-erasing morphism. A pattern…
Minimizer schemes, or just minimizers, are a very important computational primitive in sampling and sketching biological strings. Assuming a fixed alphabet of size $\sigma$, a minimizer is defined by two integers $k,w\ge2$ and a total order…
A string $w$ is called a minimal absent word (MAW) for a string $S$ if $w$ does not occur as a substring in $S$ and all proper substrings of $w$ occur in $S$. MAWs are well-studied combinatorial string objects that have potential…
We study the problem of estimating the edit distance between two $n$-character strings. While exact computation in the worst case is believed to require near-quadratic time, previous work showed that in certain regimes it is possible to…