BASS: Approximate Search on Large String Databases Jiong Yang Wei Wang Philip Yu UIUC UNC Chapel Hill IBM
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract Similarity search on a string database can be classified into two categories: exact match and approximate match. The In this paper, we study the problem on how to build an index struc- search of exact match looks for substrings in the database, ture for large string databases to efficiently support various types of which is exactly identical to the query pattern while the search string matching without the necessity of mapping the substrings to of approximate match allows some types of imperfection such a numerical space (e.g., string B-tree and MRS-index) nor the re- as substitutions between certain symbols, some degree of mis- striction of in-memory practice (e.g., suffix tree and suffix array). alignment, and the presence of “wild-card” in the query pat- Towards this goal, we propose a new indexing scheme, BASS-tree, tern. We shall mention that supporting approximate match is to efficiently support general approximate substring match (in terms very important to many applications. For instance, biologists of certain symbol substitutions and misalignments) in sublinear time have observed that mutations between certain pair of amino on a large string database. The key idea behind the design is that all acids may occur at a noticeable probability in some proteins positions in each string are grouped recursively into a fully balanced and such a mutation usually does not alter the biological func- tree according to the similarities of the subsequent segments starting tion of the proteins.