A (1.5 + ε)-Approximation Algorithm for Unsigned Translocation Distance

Genome rearrangement is an important area in computational biology and bioinformatics. The translocation operation is one of the popular operations for genome rearrangement. It was proved that computing the unsigned translocation distance is NP-hard. In this paper, we present a (1.5+epsiv)-approximation algorithm for computing the unsigned translocation distance that improves upon the best known 1.75-ratio. The runtime of our algorithm is O(n²+(4/epsiv)^1.5radic(log(4/epsiv)2^4/epsiv)), where n is the total number of genes in the genome.