Finding the Anticover of a String

A k-anticover of a string x is a set of pairwise distinct factors of x of equal length k, such that every symbol of x is contained into an occurrence of at least one of those factors. The existence of a k-anticover can be seen as a notion of non-redundancy, which has application in computational biology, where they are associated with various non-regulatory mechanisms. In this paper we address the complexity of the problem of finding a k-anticover of a string x if it exists, showing that the decision problem is NP-complete on general strings for k ≥ 3. We also show that the problem admits a polynomial-time solution for k = 2. For unbounded k, we provide an exact exponential algorithm to find a k-anticover of a string of length n (or determine that none exists), which runs in O∗(min{3 n−k 3 , ( k(k+1) 2 ) n k+1 }) time using polynomial space. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Mathematics of computing → Combinatorics on words