String factorisations with maximum or minimum dimension

12/20/2019

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by   Angelo Monti, et al.

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In this paper we consider two problems concerning string factorisation. Specifically given a string w and an integer k find a factorisation of w where each factor has length bounded by k and has the minimum (the FmD problem) or the maximum (the FMD problem) number of different factors. The FmD has been proved to be NP-hard even if k=2 in [9] and for this case we provide a 3/2-approximation algorithm. The FMD problem, up to our knowledge has not been considered in the literature. We show that this problem is NP-hard for any k≥ 3. In view of this we propose a 2-approximation algorithm (for any k) an exact exponential algorithm. We conclude with some open problems.