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.