Unary Words Have the Smallest Levenshtein k-Neighbourhoods - Inria - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique
Conference Papers Year : 2020

Unary Words Have the Smallest Levenshtein k-Neighbourhoods

Abstract

The edit distance (a.k.a. the Levenshtein distance) between two words is defined as the minimum number of insertions, deletions or substitutions of letters needed to transform one word into another. The Levenshtein k-neighbourhood of a word w is the set of words that are at edit distance at most k from w. This is perhaps the most important concept underlying BLAST, a widely-used tool for comparing biological sequences. A natural combinatorial question is to ask for upper and lower bounds on the size of this set. The answer to this question has important algorithmic implications as well. Myers notes that "such bounds would give a tighter characterisation of the running time of the algorithm" behind BLAST. We show that the size of the Levenshtein k-neighbourhood of any word of length n over an arbitrary alphabet is not smaller than the size of the Levenshtein k-neighbourhood of a unary word of length n, thus providing a tight lower bound on the size of the Levenshtein k-neighbourhood. We remark that this result was posed as a conjecture by Dufresne at WCTA 2019.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
LIPIcs-CPM-2020-10.pdf (729.29 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin Publisher files allowed on an open archive

Dates and versions

hal-03085847 , version 1 (22-12-2020)

Identifiers

Cite

Panagiotis Charalampopoulos, Solon P Pissis, Jakub Radoszewski, Tomasz Waleń, Wiktor Zuba. Unary Words Have the Smallest Levenshtein k-Neighbourhoods. CPM 2020 - 31st Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, Jun 2020, Copenhagen, Denmark. pp.1-12, ⟨10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2020.10⟩. ⟨hal-03085847⟩

Collections

INRIA INRIA2
42 View
117 Download

Altmetric

Share

More