Streaming for Aibohphobes: Longest Palindrome with Mismatches

A palindrome is a string that reads the same as its reverse, such as "aibohphobia" (fear of palindromes). Given an integer $d>0$, a $d$-near-palindrome is a string of Hamming distance at most $d$ from its reverse. We study the natural problem of identifying a longest $d$-near-palindrome in data streams. The problem is relevant to the analysis of DNA databases, and to the task of repairing recursive structures in documents such as XML and JSON. We present an algorithm that returns a $d$-near-palindrome whose length is within a multiplicative $(1+ε)$-factor of the longest $d$-near-palindrome. Our algorithm also returns the set of mismatched indices of the $d$-near-palindrome, using $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{d\log^7 n}{ε\log(1+ε)}\right)$ bits of space, and $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{d\log^6 n}{ε\log(1+ε)}\right)$ update time per arriving symbol. We show that $Ω(d\log n)$ space is necessary for estimating the length of longest $d$-near-palindromes with high probability. We further obtain an additive-error approximation algorithm and a comparable lower bound, as well as an exact two-pass algorithm that solves the longest $d$-near-palindrome problem using $\mathcal{O}\left(d^2\sqrt{n}\log^6 n\right)$ bits of space.