Tight approximability results for test set problems in bioinformatics

Piotr Berman, Bhaskar DasGupta, Ming Yang Kao

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

    5 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    In this paper, we investigate the test set problem and its variations that appear in a variety of applications. In general, we are given a universe of objects to be "distinguished" by a family of "tests", and we want to find the smallest sufficient collection of tests. In the simplest version, a test is a subset of the universe and two objects are distinguished by our collection if one test contains exactly one of them. Variations allow tests to be multi-valued functions or unions of "basic" tests, and different notions of the term distinguished. An important version of this problem that has applications in DNA sequence analysis has the universe consisting of strings over a small alphabet and tests that are detecting presence (or absence) of a substring. For most versions of the problem, including the latter, we establish matching lower and upper bounds on approximation ratio. When tests can be formed as unions of basic tests, we show that the problem is as hard as the graph coloring problem.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    EditorsTorben Hagerup, Jyrki Katajainen
    PublisherSpringer Verlag
    Pages39-50
    Number of pages12
    ISBN (Electronic)3540223398, 9783540223399
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2004

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    Volume3111
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

    All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

    • Theoretical Computer Science
    • General Computer Science

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