1. A method comprising: configuring a pulse-shaping filter for use with a receiver that performs reduced complexity sequence estimation on inter-symbol correlated (ISC) signals, the configuring comprising: defining a plurality of performance-related variables; setting a plurality of constraints; determining an optimized filtering configuration by applying an optimization process that is based on, at least in part, the plurality of constraints, the plurality of performance-related variables, and a symbol error rate (SER) function defined over said plurality of performance-related variables; determining one or more most-frequently-occurring error patterns in the receiver, wherein the one or more most-frequently-occurring error patterns are a subset of all error patterns occurring in the receiver; and configuring the pulse-shaping filter to optimize a minimum distance for the determined one or more most-frequently-occurring error patterns.