String Consensus Problems with Swaps and Substitutions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gabory, Estéban, Bulteau, Laurent, Fici, Gabriele, Verbeek, Hilde
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Gabory, Estéban
Bulteau, Laurent
Fici, Gabriele
Verbeek, Hilde
author_facet Gabory, Estéban
Bulteau, Laurent
Fici, Gabriele
Verbeek, Hilde
contents String consensus problems aim at finding a string that minimizes some given distance with respect to an input set of strings. In particular, in the Closest string problem, we are given a set of strings of equal length and a radius $d$. The objective is to find a new string that differs from each input string by at most $d$ substitutions. We study a generalization of this problem where, in addition to substitutions, swaps of adjacent characters are also permitted, each operation incurring a unit cost. Amir et al. showed that this generalized problem is NP-hard, even when only swaps are allowed. In this paper, we show that it is FPT with respect to the parameter $d$. Moreover, we investigate a variant in which the goal is to minimize the sum of distances from the output string to all input strings. For this version, we present a polynomial-time algorithm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_19139
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle String Consensus Problems with Swaps and Substitutions
Gabory, Estéban
Bulteau, Laurent
Fici, Gabriele
Verbeek, Hilde
Data Structures and Algorithms
Computational Complexity
String consensus problems aim at finding a string that minimizes some given distance with respect to an input set of strings. In particular, in the Closest string problem, we are given a set of strings of equal length and a radius $d$. The objective is to find a new string that differs from each input string by at most $d$ substitutions. We study a generalization of this problem where, in addition to substitutions, swaps of adjacent characters are also permitted, each operation incurring a unit cost. Amir et al. showed that this generalized problem is NP-hard, even when only swaps are allowed. In this paper, we show that it is FPT with respect to the parameter $d$. Moreover, we investigate a variant in which the goal is to minimize the sum of distances from the output string to all input strings. For this version, we present a polynomial-time algorithm.
title String Consensus Problems with Swaps and Substitutions
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Computational Complexity
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19139