The Edit Distance to $k$-Subsequence Universality

Abstract

A word $u$ is a subsequence of another word $w$ if $u$ can be obtained from $w$ by deleting some of its letters. The word $w$ with alph$(w)=\Sigma$ is called $k$-subsequence universal if the set of subsequences of length $k$ of $w$ contains all possible words of length $k$ over $\Sigma$. We propose a series of efficient algorithms computing the minimal number of edit operations (insertion, deletion, substitution) one needs to apply to a given word in order to reach the set of $k$-subsequence universal words.