Order preserving pattern matching on trees and DAGs

Abstract

The order preserving pattern matching (OPPM) problem is, given a pattern string p and a text string t, find all substrings of t which have the same relative orders as p. In this paper, we consider two variants of the OPPM problem where a set of text strings is given as a tree or a DAG. We show that the OPPM problem for a single pattern p of length m and a text tree T of size N can be solved in O(m+N) time with O(m) working space if the characters of p are drawn from an integer alphabet of polynomial size. The time complexity becomes O(m log m + N) if the pattern p is over a general ordered alphabet. We then show that the OPPM problem for a single pattern and a text DAG is NP-complete.