Suffix array for multi-pattern matching with variable length wildcards

Approximate multi-pattern matching is an important issue that is widely and frequently utilized, when the pattern contains variable-length wildcards. In this paper, two suffix array-based algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. Suffix array is an efficient data structure for exact string matching in existing studies, as well as for approximate pattern matching and multi-pattern matching. An algorithm called MMSA-S is for the short exact characters in a pattern by dynamic programming, while another algorithm called MMSA-L deals with the long exact characters by the edit distance method. Experimental results of Pizza & Chili corpus demonstrate that these two newly proposed algorithms, in most cases, are more time-efficient than the state-of-the-art comparison algorithms.