Approximation Algorithms for Sorting Permutations by Length-Weighted Short Rearrangements

Genome rearrangements are events that affect large portions of a genome. When using the rearrangement distance to compare two genomes, one wants to find a minimum cost sequence of rearrangements that transforms one into another. Since we represent genomes as permutations, we can reduce this problem to the problem of sorting a permutation with a minimum cost sequence of rearrangements. In the traditional approach, we consider that all rearrangements are equally likely to occur and we set a unitary cost for all rearrangements. However, there are two variations of the problem motivated by the observation that rearrangements involving large segments of a genome rarely occur. The first variation adds a restriction to the rearrangement's length. The second variation uses a cost function based on the rearrangement's length. In this work, we present approximation algorithms for five problems combining both variations, that is, problems with a length-limit restriction and a cost function based on the rearrangement's length.