Treffer: Approximability of Longest Run Subsequence and Complementary Minimization Problems

We study the polynomial-time approximability of the Longest Run Subsequence problem (LRS for short) and its complementary minimization variant Minimum Run Subsequence Deletion problem (MRSD for short). For a string S = s₁ ⋯ s_n over an alphabet Σ, a subsequence S' of S is S' = s_{i₁} ⋯ s_{i_p}, such that 1 ≤ i₁ < i₂ < … < i_p ≤ |S|. A run of a symbol σ ∈ Σ in S is a maximal substring of consecutive occurrences of σ. A run subsequence S' of S is a subsequence of S in which every symbol σ ∈ Σ occurs in at most one run. The co-subsequence ̅{S'} of the subsequence S' = s_{i₁} ⋯ s_{i_p} in S is the subsequence obtained by deleting all the characters in S' from S, i.e., ̅{S'} = s_{j₁} ⋯ s_{j_{n-p}} such that j₁ < j₂ < … < j_{n-p} and {j₁, …, j_{n-p}} = {1, …, n}⧵ {i₁, …, i_p}. Given a string S, the goal of LRS (resp., MRSD) is to find a run subsequence S^* of S such that the length |S^*| is maximized (resp., the number | ̅{S^*}| of deleted symbols from S is minimized) over all the run subsequences of S. Let k be the maximum number of symbol occurrences in the input S. It is known that LRS and MRSD are APX-hard even if k = 2. In this paper, we show that LRS can be approximated in polynomial time within factors of (k+2)/3 for k = 2 or 3, and 2(k+1)/5 for every k ≥ 4. Furthermore, we show that MRSD can be approximated in linear time within a factor of (k+4)/4 if k is even and (k+3)/4 if k is odd.