On the Variance of the Length of the Longest Common Subsequences in Random Words With an Omitted Letter

Abstract

We investigate the variance of the length of the longest common subsequences of two independent random words of size $n$, where the letters of one word are i.i.d. uniformly drawn from $\{\alpha_1, \alpha_2, \cdots, \alpha_m\}$, while the letters of the other word are i.i.d. drawn from $\{\alpha_1, \alpha_2, \cdots, \alpha_m, \alpha_{m+1}\}$, with probability $p > 0$ to be $\alpha_{m+1}$, and $(1-p)/m > 0$ for all the other letters. The order of the variance of this length is shown to be linear in $n$.