English

Coded trace reconstruction in a constant number of traces

Information Theory 2020-09-15 v3 Computational Complexity Data Structures and Algorithms Combinatorics math.IT

Abstract

The coded trace reconstruction problem asks to construct a code C{0,1}nC\subset \{0,1\}^n such that any xCx\in C is recoverable from independent outputs ("traces") of xx from a binary deletion channel (BDC). We present binary codes of rate 1ε1-\varepsilon that are efficiently recoverable from exp(Oq(log1/3(1ε))){\exp(O_q(\log^{1/3}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon})))} (a constant independent of nn) traces of a BDCq\operatorname{BDC}_q for any constant deletion probability q(0,1)q\in(0,1). We also show that, for rate 1ε1-\varepsilon binary codes, Ω~(log5/2(1/ε))\tilde \Omega(\log^{5/2}(1/\varepsilon)) traces are required. The results follow from a pair of black-box reductions that show that average-case trace reconstruction is essentially equivalent to coded trace reconstruction. We also show that there exist codes of rate 1ε1-\varepsilon over an Oε(1)O_{\varepsilon}(1)-sized alphabet that are recoverable from O(log(1/ε))O(\log(1/\varepsilon)) traces, and that this is tight.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.03996,
  title  = {Coded trace reconstruction in a constant number of traces},
  author = {Joshua Brakensiek and Ray Li and Bruce Spang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.03996},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

34 pages, 2 figures; FOCS 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:44:51.352Z