Constant Factor Approximation of Edit Distance of Bounded Height Unordered Trees

The edit distance problem on two unordered trees is known to be MAX SNP-hard. In this paper, we present an approximation algorithm whose approximation ratio is 2h + 2, where we consider unit cost edit operations and h is the maximum height of the two input trees. The algorithm is based on an embedding of unit cost tree edit distance into L 1 distance. We also present an efficient implementation of the algorithm using randomized dimension reduction.

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