On the Chain Pair Simplification Problem

The problem of efficiently computing and visualizing the structural resemblance between a pair of protein backbones in 3D has led Bereg et al. [4] to pose the Chain Pair Simplification problem (CPS). In this problem, given two polygonal chains A and B of lengths m and n, respectively, one needs to simplify them simultaneously, such that each of the resulting simplified chains, \(A'\) and \(B'\), is of length at most k and the discrete Frechet distance between \(A'\) and \(B'\) is at most \(\delta \), where k and \(\delta \) are given parameters. In this paper we study the complexity of CPS under the discrete Frechet distance (CPS-3F), i.e., where the quality of the simplifications is also measured by the discrete Frechet distance. Since CPS-3F was posed in 2008, its complexity has remained open. In this paper, we prove that CPS-3F is actually polynomially solvable, by presenting an \(O(m^2n^2\min \{m,n\})\) time algorithm for the corresponding minimization problem. On the other hand, we prove that if the vertices of the chains have integral weights then the problem is weakly NP-complete.