DIMACS TR: 2004-46

Tight Bounds on Deterministic Seed Design



Authors: Martin Farach-Colton, Gad M. Landau, S. Cenk Sahinalp and Dekel Tsur

ABSTRACT
Flitering is a standard technique for fast approximate string matching in practice. In Filtering, a quick first step is used to rule out almost all positions of a text as possible starting positiions for a pattern. In the followup step, a slow method is used to verify or eliminate each remaining position. The running time of such a method depends largely on the quality of the filtering step, as measured by the number of false positives it yields.

A spaced seed is a recently introduced type of filter that allows gaps in the pattern to be searched for. Spaced seeds promise to yield a much lower false positive rate, and thus have been extensively studied, though heretofore only heuristically.

In this paper, we show how to design spaced seeds with no false negatives optimally.

Paper Available at: ftp://dimacs.rutgers.edu/pub/dimacs/TechnicalReports/TechReports/2004/2004-46.ps.gz


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