Swap and mismatch edit distance

Abstract

There is no known algorithm that solves the general case of theapproximate string matching problem with the extended edit distance, where the edit operations are: insertion, deletion, mismatch and swap, in timeo(nm), wheren is the length of the text andm is the length of the pattern. In an effort to study this problem, the edit operations were analysed independently. It turns out that the approximate matching problem with only the mismatch operation can be solved in timeO(n √m logm). If the only edit operation allowed is swap, then the problem can be solved in timeO(n logm logσ), whereσ=min(m, |Σ|). In this paper we show that theapproximate string matching problem withswap andmismatch as the edit operations, can be computed in timeO(n √m logm).