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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.

Cite as

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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