Minimal Unique Substrings and Minimal Absent Words in a Sliding Window

Abstract

A substring $u$ of a string $T$ is called a minimal unique substring (MUS) of $T$ if $u$ occurs exactly once in $T$ and any proper substring of $u$ occurs at least twice in $T$. A string $w$ is called a minimal absent word (MAW) of $T$ if $w$ does not occur in $T$ and any proper substring of $w$ occurs in $T$. In this paper, we study the problems of computing MUSs and MAWs in a sliding window over a given string $T$. We first show how the set of MUSs can change in a sliding window over $T$, and present an $O(n\log \sigma )$-time and $O(d)$-space algorithm to compute MUSs in a sliding window of width $d$ over $T$, where $\sigma$ is the maximum number of distinct characters in every window. We then give tight upper and lower bounds on the maximum number of changes in the set of MAWs in a sliding window over $T$. Our bounds improve on the previous results in [Crochemore et al., 2017].