Faster Online Elastic Degenerate String Matching

An Elastic-Degenerate String [Iliopoulus et al., LATA 2017] is a sequence of sets of strings, which was recently proposed as a way to model a set of similar sequences. We give an online algorithm for the Elastic-Degenerate String Matching (EDSM) problem that runs in O(nm sqrt{m log m} + N) time and O(m) working space, where n is the number of elastic degenerate segments of the text, N is the total length of all strings in the text, and m is the length of the pattern. This improves the previous algorithm by Grossi et al. [CPM 2017] that runs in O(nm^2 + N) time.