An Instance-Based Approach to the Trace Reconstruction Problem

In the trace reconstruction problem, one observes the output of passing a binary string s ∈ {0,1}
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through a deletion channel T times and wishes to recover s from the resulting T "traces." Most of the literature has focused on characterizing the hardness of this problem in terms of the number of traces T needed for perfect reconstruction either in the worst case or in the average case (over input sequences s). In this paper, we propose an alternative, instance-based approach to the problem. We define the "Levenshtein difficulty" of a problem instance (s,T) as the probability that the resulting traces do not provide enough information for correct recovery with full certainty. One can then try to characterize, for a specific s, how T needs to scale in order for the Levenshtein difficulty to go to zero, and seek reconstruction algorithms that match this scaling for each s. For a class of binary strings with alternating long runs, we precisely characterize the scaling of T for which the Levenshtein difficulty goes to zero. For this class, we also prove that a simple "Las Vegas algorithm" has an error probability that decays to zero with the same rate as that with which the Levenshtein difficulty tends to zero.