12 Search Results for "Gabory, Esteban"

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.13
Totally Unclustered BWT Images of Any Length over Non-Binary Alphabets

Authors: Gabriele Fici, Estéban Gabory, Giuseppe Romana, and Marinella Sciortino

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 369, 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)

Abstract
We prove that for every integer n > 0 and for every alphabet Σ_k of size k ≥ 3, there exist words of length n whose Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is totally unclustered, i.e., it consists of exactly n runs with no two consecutive equal symbols. These words represent the worst-case behavior of the clustering effect of the BWT. We also establish a lower bound on their number. This contrasts with the binary case, where the existence of infinitely many totally unclustered BWT images is still an open problem, related to Artin’s conjecture on primitive roots.
Cite as

Gabriele Fici, Estéban Gabory, Giuseppe Romana, and Marinella Sciortino. Totally Unclustered BWT Images of Any Length over Non-Binary Alphabets. In 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 369, pp. 13:1-13:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{fici_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2026.13,
  author =	{Fici, Gabriele and Gabory, Est\'{e}ban and Romana, Giuseppe and Sciortino, Marinella},
  title =	{{Totally Unclustered BWT Images of Any Length over Non-Binary Alphabets}},
  booktitle =	{37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)},
  pages =	{13:1--13:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-420-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{369},
  editor =	{Bille, Philip and Prezza, Nicola},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.13},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-259399},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.13},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler Transform, BWT-runs, Repetitiveness Measure, Clustering Effect, Generalized de Bruijn Words}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.7
Optimal Structure for Prefix-Substring Queries

Authors: Paweł Gawrychowski, Florin Manea, and Jonas Richardsen

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 369, 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)

Abstract
The prefix-substring matching problem [Gu, Farach, and Beigel, SODA 1994] consists in preprocessing a string s of length n for the following queries: given a triple (i, j, k) ∈ {0, … , |s|}³ with 1 ≤ j ≤ k, representing a prefix s[1:i] and a substring s[j:k] of s, find the longest prefix of s that is a suffix of s[1:i]s[j:k]. This is an useful primitive in e.g. dynamic text indexing, compressed pattern matching, and pattern matching on block graphs. The border tree uses some basic periodicity properties to answer such queries in 𝒪(log n) time after 𝒪(n) time preprocessing of s. We design a linear-space structure that answers such queries in constant time after 𝒪(n) time preprocessing of s over a polynomial alphabet, which is worst-case optimal.
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Paweł Gawrychowski, Florin Manea, and Jonas Richardsen. Optimal Structure for Prefix-Substring Queries. In 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 369, pp. 7:1-7:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{gawrychowski_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2026.7,
  author =	{Gawrychowski, Pawe{\l} and Manea, Florin and Richardsen, Jonas},
  title =	{{Optimal Structure for Prefix-Substring Queries}},
  booktitle =	{37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-420-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{369},
  editor =	{Bille, Philip and Prezza, Nicola},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.7},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-259333},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: Border Tree, Prefix-Substring Query, Data Structures}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.14
Hardness Results on Characteristics for Elastic-Degenerate Strings

Authors: Dominik Köppl and Jannik Olbrich

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 369, 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)

Abstract
Generalizations of plain strings have been proposed as a compact way to represent a collection of nearly identical sequences or to express uncertainty at specific text positions by enumerating all possibilities. While a plain string stores a character at each of its positions, generalizations consider a set of characters (indeterminate strings), a set of strings of equal length (generalized degenerate strings, or shortly GD strings), or a set of strings of arbitrary lengths (elastic-degenerate strings, or shortly ED strings). These generalizations are of importance to compactly represent such type of data, and find applications in bioinformatics for representing and maintaining a set of genetic sequences of the same taxonomy or a multiple sequence alignment. To be of use, attention has been drawn to answering various query types such as pattern matching or measuring similarity of ED strings by generalizing techniques known to plain strings. However, for some types of queries, it has been shown that a generalization of a polynomial-time solvable query on classic strings becomes NP-hard on ED strings, e.g. [Russo et al., 2022]. In that light, we wonder about other types of queries that are of particular interest to bioinformatics: unique substrings, absent words, anti-powers, longest previous factors, and Lempel-Ziv-like compression schemes. While we obtain a polynomial time algorithm for a variation of longest previous factors, we show that all other problems are NP-hard to compute, some of them even under the restriction that the input can be modeled as an indeterminate or GD string.
Cite as

Dominik Köppl and Jannik Olbrich. Hardness Results on Characteristics for Elastic-Degenerate Strings. In 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 369, pp. 14:1-14:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{koppl_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2026.14,
  author =	{K\"{o}ppl, Dominik and Olbrich, Jannik},
  title =	{{Hardness Results on Characteristics for Elastic-Degenerate Strings}},
  booktitle =	{37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)},
  pages =	{14:1--14:25},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-420-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{369},
  editor =	{Bille, Philip and Prezza, Nicola},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.14},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-259409},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.14},
  annote =	{Keywords: Elastic-degenerate strings, NP-hardness, longest common factor, minimal unique substring, minimal absent word, anti-power, longest previous factor}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.32
Balancing Two-Dimensional Straight-Line Programs

Authors: Itai Boneh, Estéban Gabory, Paweł Gawrychowski, and Adam Górkiewicz

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 369, 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)

Abstract
We consider building, given a straight-line program (SLP) consisting of g productions deriving a two-dimensional string T of size N× N, a structure capable of providing random access to any character of T. For one-dimensional strings, it is now known how to build a structure of size 𝒪(g) that provides random access in 𝒪(log N) time. In fact, it is known that this can be obtained by building an equivalent SLP of size 𝒪(g) and depth 𝒪(log N) [Ganardi, Jeż, Lohrey, JACM 2021]. We consider the analogous question for two-dimensional strings: can we build an equivalent SLP of roughly the same size and small depth? We show that the answer is negative: there exists an infinite family of two-dimensional strings of size N× N described by a 2D SLP of size g such that any 2D SLP of depth 𝒪(log N) describing the same string must be of size Ω(g⋅ N/log³N). We complement this with an upper bound showing how to construct such a 2D SLP of size 𝒪(g⋅ N). Next, we observe that one can naturally define a generalization of 2D SLP, which we call 2D SLP with holes. We show that a known general balancing theorem by [Ganardi, Jeż, Lohrey, JACM 2021] immediately implies that, given a 2D SLP of size g deriving a string of size N× N, we can construct a 2D SLP with holes of depth 𝒪(log N) and size 𝒪(g). This allows us to conclude that there is a structure of size 𝒪(g) providing random access in 𝒪(log N) time for such a 2D SLP. Further, this can be extended (analogously as for a 1D SLP) to obtain a structure of size 𝒪(g log^ε N) providing random access in 𝒪(log N/log log N) time, for any ε > 0. The same (optimal) random access time was very recently achieved by [De and Kempa, SODA 2026], but with a significantly larger structure of size 𝒪(g log^{2+ε} N).
Cite as

Itai Boneh, Estéban Gabory, Paweł Gawrychowski, and Adam Górkiewicz. Balancing Two-Dimensional Straight-Line Programs. In 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 369, pp. 32:1-32:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{boneh_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2026.32,
  author =	{Boneh, Itai and Gabory, Est\'{e}ban and Gawrychowski, Pawe{\l} and G\'{o}rkiewicz, Adam},
  title =	{{Balancing Two-Dimensional Straight-Line Programs}},
  booktitle =	{37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)},
  pages =	{32:1--32:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-420-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{369},
  editor =	{Bille, Philip and Prezza, Nicola},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.32},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-259582},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.32},
  annote =	{Keywords: Two-dimensional string, straight-line program, random access}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.48
Generalized De Bruijn Words, Invertible Necklaces, and the Burrows-Wheeler Transform

Authors: Gabriele Fici and Estéban Gabory

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 345, 50th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2025)

Abstract
We define generalized de Bruijn words as those words having a Burrows-Wheeler transform that is a concatenation of permutations of the alphabet. We show that generalized de Bruijn words are in 1-to-1 correspondence with Hamiltonian cycles in the generalized de Bruijn graphs, introduced in the early '80s in the context of network design. When the size of the alphabet is a prime p, we define invertible necklaces as those whose BWT-matrix is non-singular. We show that invertible necklaces of length n correspond to normal bases of the finite field 𝔽_{pⁿ}, and that they form an Abelian group isomorphic to the Reutenauer group RG_pⁿ. Using known results in abstract algebra, we can make a bridge between generalized de Bruijn words and invertible necklaces. In particular, we highlight a correspondence between binary de Bruijn words of order d+1, binary necklaces of length 2^{d} having an odd number of 1’s, invertible BWT matrices of size 2^{d}× 2^{d}, and normal bases of the finite field 𝔽_{2^{2^{d}}}.
Cite as

Gabriele Fici and Estéban Gabory. Generalized De Bruijn Words, Invertible Necklaces, and the Burrows-Wheeler Transform. In 50th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 345, pp. 48:1-48:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{fici_et_al:LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.48,
  author =	{Fici, Gabriele and Gabory, Est\'{e}ban},
  title =	{{Generalized De Bruijn Words, Invertible Necklaces, and the Burrows-Wheeler Transform}},
  booktitle =	{50th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2025)},
  pages =	{48:1--48:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-388-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{345},
  editor =	{Gawrychowski, Pawe{\l} and Mazowiecki, Filip and Skrzypczak, Micha{\l}},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.48},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-241555},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.48},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler Transform, Generalized de Bruijn Word, Generalized de Bruijn Graph, Circulant Matrix, Invertible Necklace, Sandpile Group, Reutenauer Group}
}
Document
Research
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.2
On the Construction of Elastic Degenerate Strings

Authors: Nicola Rizzo, Veli Mäkinen, and Nadia Pisanti

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 132, From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday (2025)

Abstract
An elastic degenerate string (EDS) is a sequence of sets of strings. In the context of bioinformatics, EDSes can be used to represent the variations observed in a population from its consensus genome. Pattern matching and comparison problems on EDSes have been widely studied in the literature, but their construction has been largely omitted. We fill this gap by showing how algorithms originally developed for related problems of founder reconstruction can be adapted to minimize the total cardinality of the EDS sets and total length of the EDS strings in linear time, given suitable multiple alignments representing the input data.
Cite as

Nicola Rizzo, Veli Mäkinen, and Nadia Pisanti. On the Construction of Elastic Degenerate Strings. In From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 132, pp. 2:1-2:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{rizzo_et_al:OASIcs.Grossi.2,
  author =	{Rizzo, Nicola and M\"{a}kinen, Veli and Pisanti, Nadia},
  title =	{{On the Construction of Elastic Degenerate Strings}},
  booktitle =	{From Strings to Graphs, and Back Again: A Festschrift for Roberto Grossi's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{2:1--2:13},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-391-1},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{132},
  editor =	{Conte, Alessio and Marino, Andrea and Rosone, Giovanna and Vitter, Jeffrey Scott},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.2},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-238014},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Grossi.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: multiple sequence alignment, pattern matching, data structures, segmentation algorithms, founder reconstruction, dynamic programming, semi-dynamic range minimum queries, positional Burrows-Wheeler transform}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.3
BWT for String Collections

Authors: Davide Cenzato, Zsuzsanna Lipták, Nadia Pisanti, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 131, The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday (2025)

Abstract
We survey the different methods used for extending the BWT to collections of strings, following largely [Cenzato and Lipták, CPM 2022, Bioinformatics 2024]. We analyze the specific aspects and combinatorial properties of the resulting BWT variants and give a categorization of publicly available tools for computing the BWT of string collections. We show how the specific method used impacts on the resulting transform, including the number of runs, and on the dynamicity of the transform with respect to adding or removing strings from the collection. We then focus on the number of runs of these BWT variants and present the optimal BWT introduced in [Cenzato et al., DCC 2023], which implements an algorithm originally proposed by [Bentley et al., ESA 2020] to minimize the number of BWT-runs. We also discuss several recent heuristics and study their impact on the compression of biological sequences. We conclude with an overview of the applications and the impact of the BWT of string collections in bioinformatics.
Cite as

Davide Cenzato, Zsuzsanna Lipták, Nadia Pisanti, Giovanna Rosone, and Marinella Sciortino. BWT for String Collections. In The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 131, pp. 3:1-3:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{cenzato_et_al:OASIcs.Manzini.3,
  author =	{Cenzato, Davide and Lipt\'{a}k, Zsuzsanna and Pisanti, Nadia and Rosone, Giovanna and Sciortino, Marinella},
  title =	{{BWT for String Collections}},
  booktitle =	{The Expanding World of Compressed Data: A Festschrift for Giovanni Manzini's 60th Birthday},
  pages =	{3:1--3:29},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-390-4},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{131},
  editor =	{Ferragina, Paolo and Gagie, Travis and Navarro, Gonzalo},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.3},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-239113},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Manzini.3},
  annote =	{Keywords: Burrows-Wheeler transform, Extended Burrows-Wheeler transform, compressed text indexes, text compression, string collections, bioinformatics}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.28
Faster Approximate Elastic-Degenerate String Matching - Part A

Authors: Solon P. Pissis, Jakub Radoszewski, and Wiktor Zuba

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 331, 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)

Abstract
An elastic-degenerate (ED) string 𝐓 is a sequence 𝐓 = 𝐓[1] ⋯ 𝐓[n] of n finite sets of strings. The cardinality m of 𝐓 is the total number of strings in 𝐓[i], for all i ∈ [1..n]. The size N of 𝐓 is the total length of all m strings of 𝐓. ED strings have been introduced to represent a set of closely-related DNA sequences. Let P = P[1..p] be a pattern of length p and k > 0 be an integer. We consider the problem of k-Approximate ED String Matching (EDSM): searching k-approximate occurrences of P in the language of 𝐓. We call k-Approximate EDSM under the Hamming distance, k-Mismatch EDSM; and we call k-Approximate EDSM under edit distance, k-Edit EDSM. Bernardini et al. (Theoretical Computer Science, 2020) showed a simple 𝒪(k m p + kN)-time algorithm for k-Mismatch EDSM and an 𝒪(k² m p + kN)-time algorithm for k-Edit EDSM. We improve the dependency on k in both results, obtaining an Õ(k^{2/3}mp+√kN)-time algorithm for k-Mismatch EDSM and an Õ(kmp+ kN)-time algorithm for k-Edit EDSM. Bernardini et al. (Theory of Computing Systems, 2024) presented several algorithms for 1-Approximate EDSM working in Õ(np²+N) time. They have also left the possibility to generalize these solutions for k > 1 as an open problem. We improve the runtime of their solution for 1-Mismatch and 1-Edit EDSM from Õ(np²+N) to 𝒪(np²+N). We further show algorithms for k-Approximate EDSM for the Hamming and edit distances working in Õ(np² + N) time, for any constant k > 0. Finally, we show how our techniques can be applied to improve upon the complexity of the k-Approximate ED String Intersection and k-Approximate Doubly EDSM problems that were introduced very recently by Gabory et al. (Information and Computation, 2025).
Cite as

Solon P. Pissis, Jakub Radoszewski, and Wiktor Zuba. Faster Approximate Elastic-Degenerate String Matching - Part A. In 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 331, pp. 28:1-28:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{pissis_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2025.28,
  author =	{Pissis, Solon P. and Radoszewski, Jakub and Zuba, Wiktor},
  title =	{{Faster Approximate Elastic-Degenerate String Matching - Part A}},
  booktitle =	{36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)},
  pages =	{28:1--28:19},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-369-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{331},
  editor =	{Bonizzoni, Paola and M\"{a}kinen, Veli},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.28},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231227},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.28},
  annote =	{Keywords: ED string, approximate string matching, Hamming distance, edit distance}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.29
Faster Approximate Elastic-Degenerate String Matching - Part B

Authors: Paweł Gawrychowski, Adam Górkiewicz, Pola Marciniak, Solon P. Pissis, and Karol Pokorski

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 331, 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)

Abstract
We revisit the complexity of approximate pattern matching in an elastic-degenerate string. Such a string is a sequence of n finite sets of strings of total length N, and compactly describes a collection of strings obtained by first choosing exactly one string in every set, and then concatenating them together. This is motivated by the need of storing a collection of highly similar DNA sequences. The basic algorithmic question on elastic-degenerate strings is pattern matching: given such an elastic-degenerate string and a standard pattern of length m, check if the pattern occurs in one of the strings in the described collection. Bernardini et al. [SICOMP 2022] showed how to leverage fast matrix multiplication to obtain an Õ(nm^{ω-1})+𝒪(N)-time complexity for this problem, where ω is the matrix multiplication exponent. However, from the point of view of possible applications, it is more desirable to work with approximate pattern matching, where we seek approximate occurrences of the pattern. This generalization has been considered in a few papers already, but the best result so far for occurrences with k mismatches, where k is a constant, is the Õ(nm²+N)-time algorithm presented in Part A [CPM 2025]. This brings the question whether increasing the dependency on m from m^{ω-1} to quadratic is necessary when moving from k = 0 to larger (but still constant) k. We design an Õ(nm^{1.5}+N)-time algorithm for pattern matching with k mismatches in an elastic-degenerate string, for any constant k. To obtain this time bound, we leverage the structural characterization of occurrences with k mismatches of Charalampopoulos, Kociumaka, and Wellnitz [FOCS 2020] together with fast Fourier transform. We need to work with multiple patterns at the same time, instead of a single pattern, which requires refining the original characterization. This might be of independent interest.
Cite as

Paweł Gawrychowski, Adam Górkiewicz, Pola Marciniak, Solon P. Pissis, and Karol Pokorski. Faster Approximate Elastic-Degenerate String Matching - Part B. In 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 331, pp. 29:1-29:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{gawrychowski_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2025.29,
  author =	{Gawrychowski, Pawe{\l} and G\'{o}rkiewicz, Adam and Marciniak, Pola and Pissis, Solon P. and Pokorski, Karol},
  title =	{{Faster Approximate Elastic-Degenerate String Matching - Part B}},
  booktitle =	{36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)},
  pages =	{29:1--29:21},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-369-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{331},
  editor =	{Bonizzoni, Paola and M\"{a}kinen, Veli},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.29},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231236},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.29},
  annote =	{Keywords: ED string, approximate pattern matching, Hamming distance, k mismatches}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2024.14
A Unifying Taxonomy of Pattern Matching in Degenerate Strings and Founder Graphs

Authors: Rocco Ascone, Giulia Bernardini, Alessio Conte, Massimo Equi, Esteban Gabory, Roberto Grossi, and Nadia Pisanti

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 312, 24th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI 2024)

Abstract
Elastic Degenerate (ED) strings and Elastic Founder (EF) graphs are two versions of acyclic components of pangenomes. Both ED strings and EF graphs (which we collectively name variable strings) extend the well-known notion of indeterminate string. Recent work has extensively investigated algorithmic tasks over these structures, and over several other variable strings notions that they generalise. Among such tasks, the basic operation of matching a pattern into a text, which can serve as a toolkit for many pangenomic data analyses using these data structures, deserves special attention. In this paper we: (1) highlight a clear taxonomy within both ED strings and EF graphs ranging through variable strings of all types, from the linear string up to the most general one; (2) investigate the problem PvarT(X,Y) of matching a solid or variable pattern of type X into a variable text of type Y; (3) using as a reference the quadratic conditional lower bounds that are known for PvarT(solid,ED) and PvarT(solid,EF), for all possible types of variable strings X and Y we either prove the quadratic conditional lower bound for PvarT(X,Y), or provide non-trivial, often sub-quadratic, upper bounds, also exploiting the above-mentioned taxonomy.
Cite as

Rocco Ascone, Giulia Bernardini, Alessio Conte, Massimo Equi, Esteban Gabory, Roberto Grossi, and Nadia Pisanti. A Unifying Taxonomy of Pattern Matching in Degenerate Strings and Founder Graphs. In 24th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 312, pp. 14:1-14:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{ascone_et_al:LIPIcs.WABI.2024.14,
  author =	{Ascone, Rocco and Bernardini, Giulia and Conte, Alessio and Equi, Massimo and Gabory, Esteban and Grossi, Roberto and Pisanti, Nadia},
  title =	{{A Unifying Taxonomy of Pattern Matching in Degenerate Strings and Founder Graphs}},
  booktitle =	{24th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI 2024)},
  pages =	{14:1--14:21},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-340-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{312},
  editor =	{Pissis, Solon P. and Sung, Wing-Kin},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2024.14},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-206586},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.WABI.2024.14},
  annote =	{Keywords: Pangenomics, pattern matching, degenerate string, founder graph, fine-grained complexity}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2023.11
Comparing Elastic-Degenerate Strings: Algorithms, Lower Bounds, and Applications

Authors: Esteban Gabory, Moses Njagi Mwaniki, Nadia Pisanti, Solon P. Pissis, Jakub Radoszewski, Michelle Sweering, and Wiktor Zuba

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 259, 34th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2023)

Abstract
An elastic-degenerate (ED) string T is a sequence of n sets T[1],…,T[n] containing m strings in total whose cumulative length is N. We call n, m, and N the length, the cardinality and the size of T, respectively. The language of T is defined as ℒ(T) = {S_1 ⋯ S_n : S_i ∈ T[i] for all i ∈ [1,n]}. ED strings have been introduced to represent a set of closely-related DNA sequences, also known as a pangenome. The basic question we investigate here is: Given two ED strings, how fast can we check whether the two languages they represent have a nonempty intersection? We call the underlying problem the ED String Intersection (EDSI) problem. For two ED strings T₁ and T₂ of lengths n₁ and n₂, cardinalities m₁ and m₂, and sizes N₁ and N₂, respectively, we show the following: - There is no 𝒪((N₁N₂)^{1-ε})-time algorithm, thus no 𝒪((N₁m₂+N₂m₁)^{1-ε})-time algorithm and no 𝒪((N₁n₂+N₂n₁)^{1-ε})-time algorithm, for any constant ε > 0, for EDSI even when T₁ and T₂ are over a binary alphabet, unless the Strong Exponential-Time Hypothesis is false. - There is no combinatorial 𝒪((N₁+N₂)^{1.2-ε}f(n₁,n₂))-time algorithm, for any constant ε > 0 and any function f, for EDSI even when T₁ and T₂ are over a binary alphabet, unless the Boolean Matrix Multiplication conjecture is false. - An 𝒪(N₁log N₁log n₁+N₂log N₂log n₂)-time algorithm for outputting a compact (RLE) representation of the intersection language of two unary ED strings. In the case when T₁ and T₂ are given in a compact representation, we show that the problem is NP-complete. - An 𝒪(N₁m₂+N₂m₁)-time algorithm for EDSI. - An Õ(N₁^{ω-1}n₂+N₂^{ω-1}n₁)-time algorithm for EDSI, where ω is the exponent of matrix multiplication; the Õ notation suppresses factors that are polylogarithmic in the input size. We also show that the techniques we develop have applications outside of ED string comparison.
Cite as

Esteban Gabory, Moses Njagi Mwaniki, Nadia Pisanti, Solon P. Pissis, Jakub Radoszewski, Michelle Sweering, and Wiktor Zuba. Comparing Elastic-Degenerate Strings: Algorithms, Lower Bounds, and Applications. In 34th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 259, pp. 11:1-11:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)

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@InProceedings{gabory_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2023.11,
  author =	{Gabory, Esteban and Mwaniki, Moses Njagi and Pisanti, Nadia and Pissis, Solon P. and Radoszewski, Jakub and Sweering, Michelle and Zuba, Wiktor},
  title =	{{Comparing Elastic-Degenerate Strings: Algorithms, Lower Bounds, and Applications}},
  booktitle =	{34th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2023)},
  pages =	{11:1--11:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-276-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{259},
  editor =	{Bulteau, Laurent and Lipt\'{a}k, Zsuzsanna},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2023.11},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-179650},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2023.11},
  annote =	{Keywords: elastic-degenerate string, sequence comparison, languages intersection, pangenome, acronym identification}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2022.16
On Strings Having the Same Length- k Substrings

Authors: Giulia Bernardini, Alessio Conte, Esteban Gabory, Roberto Grossi, Grigorios Loukides, Solon P. Pissis, Giulia Punzi, and Michelle Sweering

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 223, 33rd Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2022)

Abstract
Let Substr_k(X) denote the set of length-k substrings of a given string X for a given integer k > 0. We study the following basic string problem, called z-Shortest 𝒮_k-Equivalent Strings: Given a set 𝒮_k of n length-k strings and an integer z > 0, list z shortest distinct strings T₁,…,T_z such that Substr_k(T_i) = 𝒮_k, for all i ∈ [1,z]. The z-Shortest 𝒮_k-Equivalent Strings problem arises naturally as an encoding problem in many real-world applications; e.g., in data privacy, in data compression, and in bioinformatics. The 1-Shortest 𝒮_k-Equivalent Strings, referred to as Shortest 𝒮_k-Equivalent String, asks for a shortest string X such that Substr_k(X) = 𝒮_k. Our main contributions are summarized below: - Given a directed graph G(V,E), the Directed Chinese Postman (DCP) problem asks for a shortest closed walk that visits every edge of G at least once. DCP can be solved in 𝒪̃(|E||V|) time using an algorithm for min-cost flow. We show, via a non-trivial reduction, that if Shortest 𝒮_k-Equivalent String over a binary alphabet has a near-linear-time solution then so does DCP. - We show that the length of a shortest string output by Shortest 𝒮_k-Equivalent String is in 𝒪(k+n²). We generalize this bound by showing that the total length of z shortest strings is in 𝒪(zk+zn²+z²n). We derive these upper bounds by showing (asymptotically tight) bounds on the total length of z shortest Eulerian walks in general directed graphs. - We present an algorithm for solving z-Shortest 𝒮_k-Equivalent Strings in 𝒪(nk+n²log²n+zn²log n+|output|) time. If z = 1, the time becomes 𝒪(nk+n²log²n) by the fact that the size of the input is Θ(nk) and the size of the output is 𝒪(k+n²).
Cite as

Giulia Bernardini, Alessio Conte, Esteban Gabory, Roberto Grossi, Grigorios Loukides, Solon P. Pissis, Giulia Punzi, and Michelle Sweering. On Strings Having the Same Length- k Substrings. In 33rd Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 223, pp. 16:1-16:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)

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@InProceedings{bernardini_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2022.16,
  author =	{Bernardini, Giulia and Conte, Alessio and Gabory, Esteban and Grossi, Roberto and Loukides, Grigorios and Pissis, Solon P. and Punzi, Giulia and Sweering, Michelle},
  title =	{{On Strings Having the Same Length- k Substrings}},
  booktitle =	{33rd Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2022)},
  pages =	{16:1--16:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-234-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2022},
  volume =	{223},
  editor =	{Bannai, Hideo and Holub, Jan},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2022.16},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-161439},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2022.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: string algorithms, combinatorics on words, de Bruijn graph, Chinese Postman}
}
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