Asymptotic Analysis of the kth Subword Complexity

Patterns within strings enable us to extract vital information regarding a string’s randomness. Understanding whether a string is random (Showing no to little repetition in patterns) or periodic (showing repetitions in patterns) are described by a value that is called the kth Subword Complexity of the character string. By definition, the kth Subword Complexity is the number of distinct substrings of length k that appear in a given string. In this paper, we evaluate the expected value and the second factorial moment (followed by a corollary on the second moment) of the kth Subword Complexity for the binary strings over memory-less sources. We first take a combinatorial approach to derive a probability generating function for the number of occurrences of patterns in strings of finite length. This enables us to have an exact expression for the two moments in terms of patterns’ auto-correlation and correlation polynomials. We then investigate the asymptotic behavior for values of [Formula: see text]. In the proof, we compare the distribution of the kth Subword Complexity of binary strings to the distribution of distinct prefixes of independent strings stored in a trie. The methodology that we use involves complex analysis, analytical poissonization and depoissonization, the Mellin transform, and saddle point analysis.