On the relationship between histogram indexing and block-mass indexing

Histogram indexing, also known as jumbled pattern indexing and permutation indexing is one of the important current open problems in pattern matching. It was introduced about 6 years ago and has seen active research since. Yet, to date there is no algorithm that can preprocess a text T in time o(|T|2/polylog|T|) and achieve histogram indexing, even over a binary alphabet, in time independent of the text length. The pattern matching version of this problem has a simple linear-time solution. Blockmass pattern matching problem is a recently introduced problem, motivated by issues in mass-spectrometry. It is also an example of a pattern matching problem that has an efficient, almost linear-time solution but whose indexing version is daunting. However, for fixed finite alphabets, there has been progress made. In this paper, a strong connection between the histogram indexing problem and the block-mass pattern indexing problem is shown. The reduction we show between the two problems is amazingly simple. Its value lies in recognizing the connection between these two apparently disparate problems, rather than the complexity of the reduction. In addition, we show that for both these problems, even over unbounded alphabets, there are algorithms that preprocess a text T in time o(|T|2/polylog|T|) and enable answering indexing queries in time polynomial in the query length. The contributions of this paper are twofold: (i) we introduce the idea of allowing a trade-off between the preprocessing time and query time of various indexing problems that have been stumbling blocks in the literature. (ii) We take the first step in introducing a class of indexing problems that, we believe, cannot be pre-processed in time o(|T|2/polylog|T|) and enable linear-time query processing.