The restriction scaffold assignment problem takes as input two finite point sets S and T (with S containing more points than T ) and establishes a correspondence between points in S and points in T , such that each point in S maps to exactly one point in T and each point in T maps to at least one point in S. An algorithm is presented that finds a minimum-cost solution for this problem in O(n log n) time, provided that the points in S and T are restricted to lie on a line and the cost function delta is the L(1) metric. This algorithm runs in linear time, if S and T are presorted. This improves the previously best-known O(n (2))-time algorithm for this problem.
Let S and T be two finite sets of points on the real line with |S| + |T | = n and |S| > |T |. The restriction scaffold assignment problem in computational biology assigns each point of S to a point of T such that the sum of all the assignment costs is minimized, with the constraint that every element of T must be assigned at least one element of S. The cost of assigning an element s i of S to an element t j of T is |s i −t j |, i.e., the distance between s i and t j . In 2003 Ben-Dor, Karp, Schwikowski and Shamir [2] published an O(n log n) time algorithm for this problem. Here we provide a counter-example to their algorithm and present a new algorithm that runs in O(n 2 ) time, improving the best previous complexity of O(n 3 ).
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