Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This work studies two topics in sequence analysis. In the first part, we investigate the large deviations of the shape of the random RSK Young diagrams, associated with a random word of size n whose letters are independently drawn from an alphabet of size m=m(n). When the letters are drawn uniformly and when both n and m converge together to infinity, m not growing too fast with respect to n, the large deviations of the shape of the Young diagrams are shown to be the same as that of the spectrum of the traceless GUE. Since the length of the top row of the Young diagrams is the length of the longest (weakly) increasing subsequence of the random word, the corresponding large deviations follow. When the letters are drawn with non-uniform probability, a control of both highest probabilities will ensure that the length of the top row of the diagrams satisfies a large deviation principle. In either case, speeds and rate functions are identified. To complete this first part, non-asymptotic concentration bounds for the length of the top row of the diagrams are obtained. In the second part, we investigate the order of the r-th, 1\le r < +\infty, central moment of the length of the longest common subsequence of two independent random words of size n whose letters are identically distributed and independently drawn from a finite alphabet. When all but one of the letters are drawn with small probabilities, which depend on the size of the alphabet, the r-th central moment is shown to be of order n^{r/2}. In particular, when r=2, the order of the variance is linear.

"Shadowing" in dynamical systems is the property that an approximate orbit (satisfying some additional properties) can be followed closely by a true orbit. This is a basic tool to construct complicated orbits since construction of approximate orbits is sometimes easier. It is also important in applications since numerical computations produce only approximate orbits and it requires an extra argument to show that the approximate ofbit produced by the computer corresponds to a real orbit. There are three standard mechanicsms for shadowing: Hyperbolicity, topological methods, shadowing of minimizers. We will present hyperbolicity.