Pattern matching with address errors: Rearrangement distances

Historically, approximate pattern matching has mainly focused at coping with errors in the data, while the order of the text/pattern was assumed to be more or less correct. In this paper we consider a class of pattern matching problems where the content is assumed to be correct, while the locations may have shifted/changed. We formally define a broad class of problems of this type, capturing situations in which the pattern is obtained from the text by a sequence of rearrangements. We consider several natural rearrangement schemes, including the analogues of the ℓ1 and ℓ2 distances, as well as two distances based on interchanges. For these, we present efficient algorithms to solve the resulting string matching problems.