Representing Paths in Digraphs

In this contribution we consider two combinatorial problems related to graph string matching, motivated by recent approaches in computational genomics. Given a DAG where each node is labeled by a symbol, the problems aim to find a path in the DAG whose nodes contain all (or the maximum number of) symbols of the alphabet. We introduce a decision problem, Σ-Representing Path, that asks whether there exists a path that contains all the symbols of the alphabet, and an optimization problem, called Maximum Representing Path, that asks for a path that contains the maximum number of symbols. We analyze the complexity of the problems, showing the NP-completeness of Σ-Representing Path when each symbol labels at most three nodes in the DAG, and showing the APX-hardness of Maximum Representing Path when each symbol labels at most two nodes in the DAG. We complement the first result by giving a polynomial-time algorithm for Σ-Representing Path when each symbol labels at most two nodes in the DAG. Then we investigate the parameterized complexity of the two problems when the DAG has a limited distance from a set of disjoint paths and we show that both problems are W[1]-hard for this parameter. We consider the approximation of Maximum Representing Path, giving an approximation algorithm of factor √OPT, where OPT is the value of an optimal solution of the problem. We also show that Maximum Representing Path cannot be approximated within factore−e1 − α, for any constant α > 0, unless NP ⊆ DTIME(|V |O(log log |V |)) (V is the set of nodes of the DAG).