Approximate Cartesian Tree Matching with Substitutions

Abstract

The Cartesian tree of a sequence captures the relative order of the sequence’s elements. In recent years, Cartesian tree matching has attracted considerable attention, particularly due to its applications in time series analysis. Consider a text T of length n and a pattern P of length m. In the exact Cartesian tree matching problem, the task is to find all length-m fragments of T whose Cartesian tree coincides with the Cartesian tree CT(P) of the pattern. Although the exact version of the problem can be solved in linear time [Park et al., TCS 2020], it remains rather restrictive; for example, it is not robust to outliers in the pattern.
To overcome this limitation, we consider the approximate setting, where the goal is to identify all fragments of T that are close to some string whose Cartesian tree matches CT(P). In this work, we quantify closeness via the widely used Hamming distance metric. For a given integer parameter k > 0, we present an algorithm that computes all fragments of T that are at Hamming distance at most k from a string whose Cartesian tree matches CT(P). Our algorithm runs in time 𝒪(n √m ⋅ k^{2.5}) for k ≤ m^{1/5} and in time 𝒪(nk⁵) for k ≥ m^{1/5}, thereby improving upon the state-of-the-art 𝒪(nmk)-time algorithm of Kim and Han [TCS 2025] in the regime k = o(m^{1/4}).
On the way to our solution, we develop a toolbox of independent interest. First, we introduce a new notion of periodicity in Cartesian trees. Then, we lift multiple well-known combinatorial and algorithmic results for string matching and periodicity in strings to Cartesian tree matching and periodicity in Cartesian trees.