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arXiv · 2610.06717

Subsequence Analysis Problems for Binary Parikh Matrices

Szilárd Zsolt Fazekas·Xinhao Huang·Robert Mercaş
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Abstract

The universality index corresponding to a word is the largest integer k such that every word of length k over the given alphabet occurs in it as a subsequence. Relative to languages this notion can be investigated with respect to both existential and universal quantifiers, with the former corresponding to the existence of a word in the language with universality index at least k, while the latter considers the index across all words that the language contains. In this work we study the existential (exists-universality) and universal (forall-universality) subsequence universality (as introduced in [Adamson et al., ISAAC 2023]) for binary languages consisting of all words with a fixed number of letters a, letters b, and subsequences ab. We prove that both exists- and forall-universality admit exact arithmetic characterizations for these languages. Extending the above notions, we end the paper by initiating the analysis of the probability of a fixed word occurring as subsequence of the words in such a language. To this end, we prove that, for every fixed pattern word w and an error tolerance, given as input the subsequence counts describing a language, the ratio of words in the language having the pattern w as a subsequence admits an additive approximation scheme that is polynomial-time in the binary encoding of the input counts.

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BibTeXRIS

Szilárd Zsolt Fazekas, Xinhao Huang, Robert Mercaş. 2026-10-05. Subsequence Analysis Problems for Binary Parikh Matrices. https://doi.org/10.4204/eptcs.451.10

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