Nonasymptotic Upper Bounds for Deletion Correcting Codes

Explicit nonasymptotic upper bounds on the sizes of multiple-deletion correcting codes are presented. In particular, the largest single-deletion correcting code for q-ary alphabet and string length is shown to be of size at most (qⁿ-q)/{(q-1)(n-1)}. An improved bound on the asymptotic rate function is obtained as a corollary. Upper bounds are also derived on sizes of codes for a constrained source that does not necessarily comprise of all strings of a particular length, and this idea is demonstrated by application to sets of run-length limited strings. The problem of finding the largest deletion correcting code is modeled as a matching problem on a hypergraph. This problem is formulated as an integer linear program. The upper bound is obtained by the construction of a feasible point for the dual of the linear programming relaxation of this integer linear program. The nonasymptotic bounds derived imply the known asymptotic bounds of Levenshtein and Tenengolts and improve on known nonasymptotic bounds. Numerical results support the conjecture that in the binary case, the Varshamov-Tenengolts codes are the largest single-deletion correcting codes.