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Concept
Longest common subsequence
Summary
A longest common subsequence (LCS) is the longest subsequence common to all sequences in a set of sequences (often just two sequences). It differs from the longest common substring: unlike substrings, subsequences are not required to occupy consecutive positions within the original sequences. The problem of computing longest common subsequences is a classic computer science problem, the basis of data comparison programs such as the diff utility, and has applications in computational linguistics and bioinformatics. It is also widely used by revision control systems such as Git for reconciling multiple changes made to a revision-controlled collection of files.
For example, consider the sequences (ABCD) and (ACBAD). They have 5 length-2 common subsequences: (AB), (AC), (AD), (BD), and (CD); 2 length-3 common subsequences: (ABD) and (ACD); and no longer common subsequences. So (ABD) and (ACD) are their longest common subsequences.
For the general case of an arbitrary number of input sequences, the problem is NP-hard. When the number of sequences is constant, the problem is solvable in polynomial time by dynamic programming.
Given sequences of lengths , a naive search would test each of the subsequences of the first sequence to determine whether they are also subsequences of the remaining sequences; each subsequence may be tested in time linear in the lengths of the remaining sequences, so the time for this algorithm would be
For the case of two sequences of n and m elements, the running time of the dynamic programming approach is O(n × m). For an arbitrary number of input sequences, the dynamic programming approach gives a solution in
There exist methods with lower complexity,
which often depend on the length of the LCS, the size of the alphabet, or both.
The LCS is not necessarily unique; in the worst case, the number of common subsequences is exponential in the lengths of the inputs, so the algorithmic complexity must be at least exponential.
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