An Efficient Systolic Algorithm for the Longest Common Subsequence Problem

A longest common subsequence (LCS) of two strings is a common subsequence of the two strings of maximal length. The LCS problem is to find an LCS of two given strings and the length of the LCS (LLCS). In this paper, a fast linear systolic algorithm that improves on previous systolic algorithms for solving the LCS problem is presented. For two given strings of length m and n, where m n, the LLCS and an LCS can be found in m + 2n – 1 time steps. This algorithm achieves the tight lower bound of the time complexity under the situation where symbols are input sequentially to a linear array of n processors. The systolic algorithm can be modified to take only m + n steps on multicomputers by using the scatter operation.     

APPLICATION-SPECIFIC ARRAY PROCESSORS FOR THE LONGEST COMMON SUBSEQUENCE PROBLEM OF THREE SEQUENCES ∗ †

Abstract

We design linear time systolic-based parallel algorithms that run on two-dimensional arrays for both computing the length and recovering a longest common subsequence of three given sequences that are appropriate for very large-scale integration (VLSI) implementation. These problems have been qualified to be difficult to be solved in linear time in [14], and our approach, which generalizes the methods used for determining a longest common subsequence of two strings [28,38] to the case of three strings, enables to solve both problems in linear time. Given the three sequences A, B and C of length n, m and l (n ≤ m ≤ l;), we provide an algorithm that computes the length p of their longest common subsequence on a modular I/O bounded one-way two-dimensional array of nm processors in n + 2m + l? 1 time-steps. To compute a longest common subsequence of the three given strings, we show that each processor of the above array requires an O(min{n,p\) local storage to solve the problem in In + 1m + 1 + p — 2 time-steps.     

A linear space algorithm for the LCS problem

Summary The LCS problem is to determine the longest common subsequence (LCS) of two strings. A new linear-space algorithm to solve the LCS problem is presented. The only other algorithm with linear-space complexity is by Hirschberg and has runtime complexity O(mn). Our algorithm, based on the divide and conquer technique, has runtime complexity O(n(m-p)), where p is the length of the LCS.     

Parallel algorithms for the longest common subsequence problem

A subsequence of a given string is any string obtained by deleting none or some symbols from the given string. A longest common subsequence (LCS) of two strings is a common subsequence of both that is as long as any other common subsequences. The problem is to find the LCS of two given strings. The bound on the complexity of this problem under the decision tree model is known to be mn if the number of distinct symbols that can appear in strings is infinite, where m and n are the lengths of the two strings, respectively, and m⩽n. In this paper, we propose two parallel algorithms far this problem on the CREW-PRAM model. One takes O(log² m + log n) time with mn/log m processors, which is faster than all the existing algorithms on the same model. The other takes O(log² m log log m) time with mn/(log² m log log m) processors when log² m log log m > log n, or otherwise O(log n) time with mn/log n processors, which is optimal in the sense that the time×processors bound matches the complexity bound of the problem. Both algorithms exploit nice properties of the LCS problem that are discovered in this paper     

On the parameterized complexity of the repetition free longest common subsequence problem

Longest common subsequence is a widely used measure to compare strings, in particular in computational biology. Recently, several variants of the longest common subsequence have been introduced to tackle the comparison of genomes. In particular, the Repetition Free Longest Common Subsequence (RFLCS) problem is a variant of the LCS problem that asks for a longest common subsequence of two input strings with no repetition of symbols. In this paper, we investigate the parameterized complexity of RFLCS. First, we show that the problem does not admit a polynomial kernel. Then, we present a randomized FPT algorithm for the RFLCS problem, improving the time complexity of the existent FPT algorithm.     

Longest common subsequence between run-length-encoded strings: a new algorithm with improved parallelism

Data compression can be used to simultaneously reduce memory, communication and computation requirements of string comparison. In this paper we address the problem of computing the length of the longest common subsequence (LCS) between run-length-encoded (RLE) strings. We exploit RLE both to reduce the complexity of LCS computation from O(M×N) to O(mN+Mn−mn), where M and N are the lengths of the original strings and m and n the number of runs in their RLE representation, and to improve the inherent parallelism of the proposed algorithm, so that it may execute in O(m+n) steps on a systolic array of M+N units.We also discuss the application of the proposed algorithm to the related problem of edit distance (ED) computation.     

New efficient algorithms for the LCS and constrained LCS problems

In this paper, we study the classic and well-studied longest common subsequence (LCS) problem and a recent variant of it, namely the constrained LCS (CLCS) problem. In the CLCS problem, the computed LCS must also be a supersequence of a third given string. In this paper, we first present an efficient algorithm for the traditional LCS problem that runs in O(Rloglogn+n) time, where R is the total number of ordered pairs of positions at which the two strings match and n is the length of the two given strings. Then, using this algorithm, we devise an algorithm for the CLCS problem having time complexity O(pRloglogn+n) in the worst case, where p is the length of the third string.     

On the Longest Common Rigid Subsequence Problem

The longest common subsequence problem (LCS) and the closest substring problem (CSP) are two models for finding common patterns in strings, and have been studied extensively. Though both LCS and CSP are NP-Hard, they exhibit very different behavior with respect to polynomial time approximation algorithms. While LCS is hard to approximate within n ^δ for some δ>0, CSP admits a polynomial time approximation scheme. In this paper, we study the longest common rigid subsequence problem (LCRS). This problem shares similarity with both LCS and CSP and has an important application in motif finding in biological sequences. We show that it is NP-hard to approximate LCRS within ratio n ^δ , for some constant δ>0, where n is the maximum string length. We also show that it is NP-Hard to approximate LCRS within ratio Ω(m), where m is the number of strings.     

Approximate Matching of Run-Length Compressed Strings

We focus on the problem of approximate matching of strings that have been compressed using run-length encoding. Previous studies have concentrated on the problem of computing the longest common subsequence (LCS) between two strings of length m and n , compressed to m' and n' runs. We extend an existing algorithm for the LCS to the Levenshtein distance achieving O(m'n+n'm) complexity. Furthermore, we extend this algorithm to a weighted edit distance model, where the weights of the three basic edit operations can be chosen arbitrarily. This approach also gives an algorithm for approximate searching of a pattern of m letters (m' runs) in a text of n letters (n' runs) in O(mm'n') time. Then we propose improvements for a greedy algorithm for the LCS, and conjecture that the improved algorithm has O(m'n') expected case complexity. Experimental results are provided to support the conjecture.     

Longest common subsequence problem for unoriented and cyclic strings

Given a finite set of strings X, the Longest Common Subsequence problem (LCS) consists in finding a subsequence common to all strings in X that is of maximal length. LCS is a central problem in stringology and finds broad applications in text compression, conception of error-detecting codes, or biological sequence comparison. However, in numerous contexts, words represent cyclic or unoriented sequences of symbols and LCS must be generalized to consider both orientations and/or all cyclic shifts of the strings involved. This occurs especially in computational biology when genetic material is sequenced from circular DNA or RNA molecules.In this work, we define three variants of LCS when the input words are unoriented and/or cyclic. We show that these problems are -hard, and -hard if parameterized in the number of input strings. These results still hold even if the three LCS variants are restricted to input languages over a binary alphabet. We also settle the parameterized complexity of our problems for most relevant parameters. Moreover, we study the approximability of these problems: we discuss the existence of approximation bounds depending on the cardinality of the alphabet, on the length of the shortest sequence, and on the number of input sequences. For this we prove that Maximum Independent Set in r-uniform hypergraphs is -hard if parameterized in the cardinality of the sought independent set and at least as hard to approximate as Maximum Independent Set in graphs.     

A systolic array for the longest common subsequence problem

We introduce a linear systolic array for the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS, for short) problem. We first present an array of m identical cells which computes the length of an LCS of two strings of length m and n, respectively, in linear time (i.e., in time proportional to m + n). Then we show that, by extending any cell with the systolic stack introduced by Guibas and Liang (1982), a new array can be designed to recover an LCS in linear time.     

A Coarse-Grained Parallel Algorithm for the All-Substrings Longest Common Subsequence Problem

Given two strings A and B of lengths n_a and n_b, respectively, the All-substrings Longest Common Subsequence (ALCS) problem obtains, for any substring B' of B, the length of the longest string that is a subsequence of both A and B'. The sequential algorithm for this problem takes O(n_a n_b) time and O(n_b) space. We present a parallel algorithm for the ALCS problem on the Coarse-Grained Multicomputer (BSP/CGM) model with p < √n_a processors, that takes O(n_a n_b/p) time, O(log p) communication rounds and O(n_b √n_a) space per processor. The proposed algorithm also solves the basic Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) problem that finds the longest string (and not only its length) that is a subsequence of both A and B. To our knowledge, this is the best BSP/CGM algorithm in the literature for the LCS and ALCS problems.     

Maximal Common Subsequences and Minimal Common Supersequences

The problems of finding a longest common subsequence and a shortest common supersequence of a set of strings are well known. They can be solved in polynomial time for two strings (in fact the problems are dual in this case), or for any fixed number of strings, by dynamic programming. But both problems are NP-hard in general for an arbitrary numberkof strings. Here we study the related problems of finding a shortest maximal common subsequence and a longest minimal common supersequence. We describe dynamic programming algorithms for the case of two strings (for which case the problems are no longer dual), which can be extended to any fixed number of strings. We also show that both problems are NP-hard in general forkstrings, although the latter problem, unlike shortest common supersequence, is solvable in polynomial time for strings of length 2. Finally, we prove a strong negative approximability result for the shortest maximal common subsequence problem.     

On the parameterized complexity of the fixed alphabet shortest common supersequence and longest common subsequence problems

We show that the fixed alphabet shortest common supersequence (SCS) and the fixed alphabet longest common subsequence (LCS) problems parameterized in the number of strings are W[1]-hard. Unless W[1]=FPT, this rules out the existence of algorithms with time complexity of O(f(k)nα) for those problems. Here n is the size of the problem instance, α is constant, k is the number of strings and f is any function of k. The fixed alphabet version of the LCS problem is of particular interest considering the importance of sequence comparison (e.g. multiple sequence alignment) in the fixed length alphabet world of DNA and protein sequences.     

Approximate Matching of Run-Length Compressed Strings

Abstract. We focus on the problem of approximate matching of strings that have been compressed using run-length encoding. Previous studies have concentrated on the problem of computing the longest common subsequence (LCS) between two strings of length m and n , compressed to m' and n' runs. We extend an existing algorithm for the LCS to the Levenshtein distance achieving O(m'n+n'm) complexity. Furthermore, we extend this algorithm to a weighted edit distance model, where the weights of the three basic edit operations can be chosen arbitrarily. This approach also gives an algorithm for approximate searching of a pattern of m letters (m' runs) in a text of n letters (n' runs) in O(mm'n') time. Then we propose improvements for a greedy algorithm for the LCS, and conjecture that the improved algorithm has O(m'n') expected case complexity. Experimental results are provided to support the conjecture.     

Parallel comparison of run-length-encoded strings on a linear systolic array

The length of the longest common subsequence (LCS) between two strings of M and N characters can be computed by an O(M × N) dynamic programming algorithm, that can be executed in O(M + N) steps by a linear systolic array. It has been recently shown that the LCS between run-length-encoded (RLE) strings of m and n runs can be computed by an O(nM + Nm − nm) algorithm that could be executed in O(m + n) steps by a parallel hardware. However, the algorithm cannot be directly mapped on a linear systolic array because of its irregular structure.In this paper, we propose a modified algorithm that exhibits a more regular structure at the cost of a marginal reduction of the efficiency of RLE. We outline the algorithm and we discuss its mapping on a linear systolic array.     

基于图形表示的LCS问题

所谓的LCS（Longest Common Subsequence）问题,就是寻找生物序列的最长公共子序列。传统的算法都是基于字符串的比较。近几年不少学者给出了生物序列的图形表示,本文就利用DNA序列的一种二维图形表示采寻找最长公共子序列。     

A programmable array processor architecture for flexible approximate string matching algorithms

Approximate string matching problem is a common and often repeated task in information retrieval and bioinformatics. This paper proposes a generic design of a programmable array processor architecture for a wide variety of approximate string matching algorithms to gain high performance at low cost. Further, we describe the architecture of the array and the architecture of the cell in detail in order to efficiently implement for both the preprocessing and searching phases of most string matching algorithms. Further, the architecture performs approximate string matching for complex patterns that contain don’t care, complement and classes symbols. We also simulate and evaluate the proposed architecture on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) device using the JHDL tool for synthesis and the Xilinx Foundation tools for mapping, placement, and routing. Finally, our programmable implementation achieves about 8–340 times faster execution than a desktop computer with a Pentium 4 3.5 GHz for all algorithms when the length of the pattern is 1024.     

LCS approximation via embedding into locally non-repetitive strings

A classical measure of similarity between strings is the length of the longest common subsequence (LCS) between the two given strings. The search for efficient algorithms for finding the LCS has been going on for more than three decades. To date, all known algorithms may take quadratic time (shaved by logarithmic factors) to find large LCS. In this paper, the problem of approximating LCS is studied, while focusing on the hard inputs for this problem, namely, approximating LCS of near-linear size in strings over a relatively large alphabet (of size at least n^? for some constant ?>0, where n is the length of the string). We show that, any given string over a relatively large alphabet can be embedded into a locally non-repetitive string. This embedding has a negligible additive distortion for strings that are not too dissimilar in terms of the edit distance. We also show that LCS can be efficiently approximated in locally-non-repetitive strings. Our new method (the embedding together with the approximation algorithm) gives a strictly sub-quadratic time algorithm (i.e., of complexity O(n^2-?) for some constant ?) which can find common subsequences of linear (and near linear) size that cannot be detected efficiently by the existing tools.     

Efficient data parallel algorithms for multidimensional array operations based on the EKMR scheme for distributed memory multicomputers

Array operations are useful in a large number of important scientific codes, such as molecular dynamics, finite element methods, climate modeling, atmosphere and ocean sciences, etc. In our previous work, we have proposed a scheme of extended Karnaugh map representation (EKMR) for multidimensional array representation. We have shown that sequential multidimensional array operation algorithms based on the EKMR scheme have better performance than those based on the traditional matrix representation (TMR) scheme. Since parallel multidimensional array operations have been an extensively investigated problem, we present efficient data parallel algorithms for multidimensional array operations based on the EKMR scheme for distributed memory multicomputers. In a data parallel programming paradigm, in general, we distribute array elements to processors based on various distribution schemes, do local computation in each processor, and collect computation results from each processor. Based on the row, column, and 2D mesh distribution schemes, we design data parallel algorithms for matrix-matrix addition and matrix-matrix multiplication array operations in both TMR and EKMR schemes for multidimensional arrays. We also design data parallel algorithms for six Fortran 90 array intrinsic functions: All, Maxval, Merge, Pack, Sum, and Cshift. We compare the time of the data distribution, the local computation, and the result collection phases of these array operations based on the TMR and the EKMR schemes. The experimental results show that algorithms based on the EKMR scheme outperform those based on the TMR scheme for all test cases.