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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.28

Periodicity Property Testing on Strings with Wildcards

Authors: Carl Barton, Panagiotis Charalampopoulos, Taha El Ghazi, Jonas Ellert, Oded Lachish, and Tatiana Starikovskaya

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

Abstract

In this work, we study periodicity in strings with wildcards. A string T with at most k wildcards is called strongly (p,k)-periodic if the wildcards in T can be replaced with alphabet symbols to obtain a string with period p, and weakly (p,k)-periodic if T[i] matches T[i+p] for all i. Intuitively, both generalize to (≤ g, k)-periodicity, which is the property of being (p,k)-periodic for some p ∈ [1..g]. An ε-tester for a property 𝒫 is an algorithm that distinguishes between strings that satisfy 𝒫 and strings where one needs to change at least an ε-fraction of the symbols to obtain a string that satisfies 𝒫. We study one-sided error testers, where strings satisfying 𝒫 must always be accepted, while strings that are ε-far must be rejected with probability at least 2/3. The complexity of a tester is the worst-case number of symbols of an input of length n it must read to make the decision. We design the following testers for p,g ≤ n/2: 1) An ε-tester for strong (p,k)-periodicity with complexity Õ_ε(1) . 2) An ε-tester for strong (≤ g,k)-periodicity with complexity Õ_ε(√g). 3) An ε-tester for weak (p,k)-periodicity with complexity Õ_ε(min(k, n /(k+p))). 4) An ε-tester for weak (≤ g,k)-periodicity with complexity Õ_ε(min(k+ √{gk}, n/√k)). Additionally, we show a lower bound on the complexity of ε-testers for weak (≤ g,k)-periodicity, implying that our tester for weak (≤ g,k)-periodicity is optimal up to a multiplicative (ε^{-1} ln(gk))^O(1) factor for a wide range of g and k. Finally, our tester for strong (≤ g,k)-periodicity generalizes the one of [Lachish and Newman; Algorithmica 2011] for strings without wildcards, matching (up to polylogarithmic factors) the unconditional lower bound of ̃Ω(√g) in said work for constant ε.

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Carl Barton, Panagiotis Charalampopoulos, Taha El Ghazi, Jonas Ellert, Oded Lachish, and Tatiana Starikovskaya. Periodicity Property Testing on Strings with Wildcards. In 37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 369, pp. 28:1-28:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{barton_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2026.28,
  author =	{Barton, Carl and Charalampopoulos, Panagiotis and Ghazi, Taha El and Ellert, Jonas and Lachish, Oded and Starikovskaya, Tatiana},
  title =	{{Periodicity Property Testing on Strings with Wildcards}},
  booktitle =	{37th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2026)},
  pages =	{28:1--28:18},
  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.2026.28},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-259543},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2026.28},
  annote =	{Keywords: periodicity, property testing, wildcards}
}

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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2016.4

Efficient Index for Weighted Sequences

Authors: Carl Barton, Tomasz Kociumaka, Solon P. Pissis, and Jakub Radoszewski

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 54, 27th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2016)

Abstract

The problem of finding factors of a text string which are identical or similar to a given pattern string is a central problem in computer science. A generalised version of this problem consists in implementing an index over the text to support efficient on-line pattern queries. We study this problem in the case where the text is weighted: for every position of the text and every letter of the alphabet a probability of occurrence of this letter at this position is given. Sequences of this type, also called position weight matrices, are commonly used to represent imprecise or uncertain data. A weighted sequence may represent many different strings, each with probability of occurrence equal to the product of probabilities of its letters at subsequent positions. Given a probability threshold 1/z, we say that a pattern string P matches a weighted text at position i if the product of probabilities of the letters of P at positions i,...,i+|P|-1 in the text is at least 1/z. In this article, we present an O(nz)-time construction of an O(nz)-sized index that can answer pattern matching queries in a weighted text in optimal time improving upon the state of the art by a factor of z log z. Other applications of this data structure include an O(nz)-time construction of the weighted prefix table and an O(nz)-time computation of all covers of a weighted sequence, which improve upon the state of the art by the same factor.

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Carl Barton, Tomasz Kociumaka, Solon P. Pissis, and Jakub Radoszewski. Efficient Index for Weighted Sequences. In 27th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2016). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 54, pp. 4:1-4:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2016)

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@InProceedings{barton_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2016.4,
  author =	{Barton, Carl and Kociumaka, Tomasz and Pissis, Solon P. and Radoszewski, Jakub},
  title =	{{Efficient Index for Weighted Sequences}},
  booktitle =	{27th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2016)},
  pages =	{4:1--4:13},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-012-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2016},
  volume =	{54},
  editor =	{Grossi, Roberto and Lewenstein, Moshe},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2016.4},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-60807},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2016.4},
  annote =	{Keywords: weighted sequence, position weight matrix, indexing, weighted suffix tree}
}

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Periodicity Property Testing on Strings with Wildcards

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Efficient Index for Weighted Sequences

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