Reconstructing parameterized strings from parameterized suffix and LCP arrays

Abstract

Reconstructing input from a data structure entails determining whether an instance of the data structure is in fact valid or not, and if valid, discovering the underlying data that it represents. In this paper we consider the parameterized suffix array (pSA) along with its corresponding parameterized longest-common-prefix (pLCP) array and solve the following problem. Given two arrays of numbers as input, A and P, does there exist a parameterized string S such that A is its pSA and P is its pLCP array? If the answer is positive, our algorithm produces a string S whose pSA is A and whose pLCP array is P. Although the naive approach would have to consider an exponential number of possibilities for such a string S, our algorithm's time complexity is only O(n2) for input arrays of size n.