Related papers: Approximating the Median under the Ulam Metric
We present a general technique for approximating bicriteria minimization problems with positive-valued, polynomially computable objective functions. Given $0<\epsilon\leq1$ and a polynomial-time $\alpha$-approximation algorithm for the…
We study the problem of scheduling $n$ independent moldable tasks on $m$ processors that arises in large-scale parallel computations. When tasks are monotonic, the best known result is a $(\frac{3}{2}+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for…
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…
In this paper we are interested in indexing texts for substring matching queries with one edit error. That is, given a text $T$ of $n$ characters over an alphabet of size $\sigma$, we are asked to build a data structure that answers the…
The text-to-pattern Hamming distances problem asks to compute the Hamming distances between a given pattern of length $m$ and all length-$m$ substrings of a given text of length $n\ge m$. We focus on the $k$-mismatch version of the problem,…
For a graph $G$ spanning a metric space, the dilation of a pair of points is the ratio of their distance in the shortest path graph metric to their distance in the metric space. Given a graph $G$ and a budget $k$, a classic problem is to…
A pattern $\alpha$ is a string of variables and terminal letters. We say that $\alpha$ matches a word $w$, consisting only of terminal letters, if $w$ can be obtained by replacing the variables of $\alpha$ by terminal words. The matching…
We consider the task of fitting low-dimensional embeddings to high-dimensional data. In particular, we study the $k$-Euclidean Metric Violation problem ($\textsf{$k$-EMV}$), where the input is $D \in \mathbb{R}^{\binom{n}{2}}_{\geq 0}$ and…
We consider a class of pattern matching problems where a normalising transformation is applied at every alignment. Normalised pattern matching plays a key role in fields as diverse as image processing and musical information processing…
Computing the edit distance of two strings is one of the most basic problems in computer science and combinatorial optimization. Tree edit distance is a natural generalization of edit distance in which the task is to compute a measure of…
The k-median problem is a well-known strongly NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem of both theoretical and practical significance. The previous best approximation ratio for this problem is 2.611+\epsilon (Bryka et al. 2014) based on…
Estimating the density of a distribution from its samples is a fundamental problem in statistics. Hypothesis selection addresses the setting where, in addition to a sample set, we are given $n$ candidate distributions -- referred to as…
The approximate period recovery problem asks to compute all $\textit{approximate word-periods}$ of a given word $S$ of length $n$: all primitive words $P$ ($|P|=p$) which have a periodic extension at edit distance smaller than $\tau_p$ from…
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…
Since the Bin Packing Problem (BPP) is one of the main NP-hard problems, a lot of approximation algorithms have been suggested for it. It has been proven that the best algorithm for BPP has the approximation ratio of 3/2 and the time order…
We study several questions related to diversifying search results. We give improved approximation algorithms in each of the following problems, together with some lower bounds. - We give a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for a…
In the computational-mechanics structural analysis of one-dimensional cellular automata the following automata-theoretic analogue of the \emph{change-point problem} from time series analysis arises: \emph{Given a string $\sigma$ and a…
We consider an efficient two-party protocol for securely computing the similarity of strings w.r.t. an extended edit distance measure. Here, two parties possessing strings $x$ and $y$, respectively, want to jointly compute an approximate…
We consider the Maximum-weight Matching (MWM) problem in the streaming sliding window model of computation. In this model, the input consists of a sequence of weighted edges on a given vertex set $V$ of size $n$. The objective is to…
Given $x \in (\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0})^{\binom{[n]}{2}}$ recording pairwise distances, the METRIC VIOLATION DISTANCE (MVD) problem asks to compute the $\ell_0$ distance between $x$ and the metric cone; i.e., modify the minimum number of entries…