On Table Arrangements, Scrabble Freaks, and Jumbled Pattern Matching

Given a string s, the Parikh vector of s, denoted p(s), counts the multiplicity of each character in s. Searching for a match of Parikh vector q (a “jumbled string”) in the text s requires to find a substring t of s with p(t) = q. The corresponding decision problem is to verify whether at least one such match exists. So, for example for the alphabet Σ = {a, b, c}, the string s = abaccbabaaa has Parikh vector p(s) = (6, 3, 2), and the Parikh vector q = (2, 1, 1) appears once in s in position (1, 4). Like its more precise counterpart, the renown Exact String Matching, Jumbled Pattern Matching has ubiquitous applications, e.g., string matching with a dyslectic word processor, table rearrangements, anagram checking, Scrabble playing and, allegedly, also analysis of mass spectrometry data. We consider two simple algorithms for Jumbled Pattern Matching and use very complicated data structures and analytic tools to show that they are not worse than the most obvious algorithm. We also sh...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: FUN
• Authors: Peter Burcsi, Ferdinando Cicalese, Gabriele Fici, Zsuzsanna Lipták
• Keywords: Algorithms, FUN 2010, Jumbled Pattern Matching, Parikh Vector, String Matching