String algorithms are a traditional area of study in computer science. In recent years their importance has grown dramatically with the huge increase of electronically stored text and of molecular sequence data (DNA or protein sequences) produced by various genome projects. This book is a general text on computer algorithms for string processing. In addition to pure computer science, the book contains extensive discussions on biological problems that are cast as string problems, and on methods developed to solve them. It emphasises the fundamental ideas and techniques central to today's applications. New approaches to this complex material simplify methods that up to now have been for the specialist alone. With over 400 exercises to reinforce the material and develop additional topics, the book is suitable as a text for graduate or advanced undergraduate students in computer science, computational biology, or bio-informatics. Its discussion of current algorithms and techniques also makes it a reference for professionals.

This book describes a range of string problems in computer science and molecular biology and the algorithms developed to solve them.

This 1997 book describes a range of string problems in computer science and molecular biology and the algorithms developed to solve them.

The book is intended for lectures on string processes and pattern matching in Master's courses of computer science and software engineering curricula. The details of algorithms are given with correctness proofs and complexity analysis, which make them ready to implement. Algorithms are described in a C-like language. The book is also a reference for students in computational linguistics or computational biology. It presents examples of questions related to the automatic processing of natural language, to the analysis of molecular sequences, and to the management of textual databases.

This much-needed book on the design of algorithms and data structures for text processing emphasizes both theoretical foundations and practical applications. It is intended to serve both as a textbook for courses on algorithm design, especially those related to text processing, and as a reference for computer science professionals. The work takes a unique approach, one that goes more deeply into its topic than other more general books. It contains both classical algorithms and recent results of research on the subject. The book is the first text to contain a collection of a wide range of text algorithms, many of them quite new and appearing here for the first time. Other algorithms, while known by reputation, have never been published in the journal literature. Two such important algorithms are those of Karp, Miller and Rosenberg, and that of Weiner. Here they are presented together for the fist time. The core of the book is the material on suffix trees and subword graphs, applications of these data structures, new approaches to time-space optimal string-matching, and text compression. Also covered are basic parallel algorithms for text problems. Applications of all these algorithms are given for problems involving data retrieval systems, treatment of natural languages, investigation of genomes, data compression software, and text processing tools. From the theoretical point of view. the book is a goldmine of paradigms for the development of efficient algorithms, providing the necessary foundation to creating practical software dealing with sequences. A crucial point in the authors' approach is the development of a methodology for presenting text algorithms so they can be fully understood. Throughout, the book emphasizes the efficiency of algorithms, holding that the essence of their usefulness depends on it. This is especially important since the algorithms described here will find application in "Big Science" areas like molecular sequence analysis where the explosive growth of data has caused problems for the current generation of software. Finally, with its development of theoretical background, the book can be considered as a mathematical foundation for the analysis and production of text processing algorithms.

Worked problems offer an interesting way to learn and practice with key concepts of string algorithms and combinatorics on words.

Probabilistic models are becoming increasingly important in analysing the huge amount of data being produced by large-scale DNA-sequencing efforts such as the Human Genome Project. For example, hidden Markov models are used for analysing biological sequences, linguistic-grammar-based probabilistic models for identifying RNA secondary structure, and probabilistic evolutionary models for inferring phylogenies of sequences from different organisms. This book gives a unified, up-to-date and self-contained account, with a Bayesian slant, of such methods, and more generally to probabilistic methods of sequence analysis. Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, it aims to be accessible to molecular biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians with no formal knowledge of the other fields, and at the same time present the state-of-the-art in this new and highly important field.