Mean-Based Trace Reconstruction over Practically any Replication-Insertion Channel

Mean-based reconstruction is a fundamental, natural approach to worst-case trace reconstruction over channels with synchronization errors. It is known that $\exp(O(n^{1/3}))$ traces are necessary and sufficient for mean-based worst-case trace reconstruction over the deletion channel, and this result was also extended to certain channels combining deletions and geometric insertions of uniformly random bits. In this work, we use a simple extension of the original complex-analytic approach to show that these results are examples of a much more general phenomenon: $\exp(O(n^{1/3}))$ traces suffice for mean-based worst-case trace reconstruction over any memoryless channel that maps each input bit to an arbitrarily distributed sequence of replications and insertions of random bits, provided the length of this sequence follows a sub-exponential distribution.