When Majority-Vote Fails: Sequence Reconstruction under Fixed-Weight Substitutions

Abstract

We consider the problem of binary sequence reconstruction where a sequence is transmitted multiple times over a channel, and each undergoes substitution errors by an arbitrary error vector of Hamming weight exactly $t$. We determine $N_{\mathrm{wc}}$, the minimum number of distinct channel output observations guaranteeing unique reconstruction by an optimal decoder, and show that the bit-wise majority-vote decoder, which was proved by Levenshtein (2001) to be optimal for channels corrupting up to $t$ bits, is in fact suboptimal here. Despite this suboptimality, we prove a condition that admits a practical early-termination rule, necessary for every decoder at any number of outputs $N$, and sufficient for bit-wise majority-vote even below $N_{\mathrm{wc}}$. We evaluate the number of outputs at which this condition is triggered, numerically, and show that it frequently occurs below $N_{\mathrm{wc}}$ when the block-length $k>2t+1$. Finally, we propose an alternative algorithm aimed at guaranteeing unique reconstruction with fewer observations than bit-wise majority-vote, and demonstrate through exhaustive enumeration that it successfully decodes channel output-sets where bit-wise majority-vote fails.