Indexing large genome collections on a PC

Motivation: The availability of thousands of invidual genomes of one species should boost rapid progress in personalized medicine or understanding of the interaction between genotype and phenotype, to name a few applications. A key operation useful in such analyses is aligning sequencing reads against a collection of genomes, which is costly with the use of existing algorithms due to their large memory requirements. Results: We present MuGI, Multiple Genome Index, which reports all occurrences of a given pattern, in exact and approximate matching model, against a collection of thousand(s) genomes. Its unique feature is the small index size fitting in a standard computer with 16--32\,GB, or even 8\,GB, of RAM, for the 1000GP collection of 1092 diploid human genomes. The solution is also fast. For example, the exact matching queries are handled in average time of 39\,$\mu$s and with up to 3 mismatches in 373\,$\mu$s on the test PC with the index size of 13.4\,GB. For a smaller index, occupying 7.4\,GB in memory, the respective times grow to 76\,$\mu$s and 917\,$\mu$s. Availability: Software and Suuplementary material: \url{http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/mugi}

Regular Expression Search on Compressed Text

We present an algorithm for searching regular expression matches in compressed text. The algorithm reports the number of matching lines in the uncompressed text in time linear in the size of its compressed version. We define efficient data structures that yield nearly optimal complexity bounds and provide a sequential implementation --zearch-- that requires up to 25% less time than the state of the art.Comment: 10 pages, published in Data Compression Conference (DCC'19

Transform Based And Search Aware Text Compression Schemes And Compressed Domain Text Retrieval

In recent times, we have witnessed an unprecedented growth of textual information via the Internet, digital libraries and archival text in many applications. While a good fraction of this information is of transient interest, useful information of archival value will continue to accumulate. We need ways to manage, organize and transport this data from one point to the other on data communications links with limited bandwidth. We must also have means to speedily find the information we need from this huge mass of data. Sometimes, a single site may also contain large collections of data such as a library database, thereby requiring an efficient search mechanism even to search within the local data. To facilitate the information retrieval, an emerging ad hoc standard for uncompressed text is XML which preprocesses the text by putting additional user defined metadata such as DTD or hyperlinks to enable searching with better efficiency and effectiveness. This increases the file size considerably, underscoring the importance of applying text compression. On account of efficiency (in terms of both space and time), there is a need to keep the data in compressed form for as much as possible. Text compression is concerned with techniques for representing the digital text data in alternate representations that takes less space. Not only does it help conserve the storage space for archival and online data, it also helps system performance by requiring less number of secondary storage (disk or CD Rom) accesses and improves the network transmission bandwidth utilization by reducing the transmission time. Unlike static images or video, there is no international standard for text compression, although compressed formats like .zip, .gz, .Z files are increasingly being used. In general, data compression methods are classified as lossless or lossy. Lossless compression allows the original data to be recovered exactly. Although used primarily for text data, lossless compression algorithms are useful in special classes of images such as medical imaging, finger print data, astronomical images and data bases containing mostly vital numerical data, tables and text information. Many lossy algorithms use lossless methods at the final stage of the encoding stage underscoring the importance of lossless methods for both lossy and lossless compression applications. In order to be able to effectively utilize the full potential of compression techniques for the future retrieval systems, we need efficient information retrieval in the compressed domain. This means that techniques must be developed to search the compressed text without decompression or only with partial decompression independent of whether the search is done on the text or on some inversion table corresponding to a set of key words for the text. In this dissertation, we make the following contributions: (1) Star family compression algorithms: We have proposed an approach to develop a reversible transformation that can be applied to a source text that improves existing algorithm\u27s ability to compress. We use a static dictionary to convert the English words into predefined symbol sequences. These transformed sequences create additional context information that is superior to the original text. Thus we achieve some compression at the preprocessing stage. We have a series of transforms which improve the performance. Star transform requires a static dictionary for a certain size. To avoid the considerable complexity of conversion, we employ the ternary tree data structure that efficiently converts the words in the text to the words in the star dictionary in linear time. (2) Exact and approximate pattern matching in Burrows-Wheeler transformed (BWT) files: We proposed a method to extract the useful context information in linear time from the BWT transformed text. The auxiliary arrays obtained from BWT inverse transform brings logarithm search time. Meanwhile, approximate pattern matching can be performed based on the results of exact pattern matching to extract the possible candidate for the approximate pattern matching. Then fast verifying algorithm can be applied to those candidates which could be just small parts of the original text. We present algorithms for both k-mismatch and k-approximate pattern matching in BWT compressed text. A typical compression system based on BWT has Move-to-Front and Huffman coding stages after the transformation. We propose a novel approach to replace the Move-to-Front stage in order to extend compressed domain search capability all the way to the entropy coding stage. A modification to the Move-to-Front makes it possible to randomly access any part of the compressed text without referring to the part before the access point. (3) Modified LZW algorithm that allows random access and partial decoding for the compressed text retrieval: Although many compression algorithms provide good compression ratio and/or time complexity, LZW is the first one studied for the compressed pattern matching because of its simplicity and efficiency. Modifications on LZW algorithm provide the extra advantage for fast random access and partial decoding ability that is especially useful for text retrieval systems. Based on this algorithm, we can provide a dynamic hierarchical semantic structure for the text, so that the text search can be performed on the expected level of granularity. For example, user can choose to retrieve a single line, a paragraph, or a file, etc. that contains the keywords. More importantly, we will show that parallel encoding and decoding algorithm is trivial with the modified LZW. Both encoding and decoding can be performed with multiple processors easily and encoding and decoding process are independent with respect to the number of processors

Designing a resource-efficient data structure for mobile data systems

Designing data structures for use in mobile devices requires attention on optimising data volumes with associated benefits for data transmission, storage space and battery use. For semi-structured data, tree summarisation techniques can be used to reduce the volume of structured elements while dictionary compression can efficiently deal with value-based predicates. This project seeks to investigate and evaluate an integration of the two approaches. The key strength of this technique is that both structural and value predicates could be resolved within one graph while further allowing for compression of the resulting data structure. As the current trend is towards the requirement for working with larger semi-structured data sets this work would allow for the utilisation of much larger data sets whilst reducing requirements on bandwidth and minimising the memory necessary both for the storage and querying of the data

TopSig: Topology Preserving Document Signatures

Performance comparisons between File Signatures and Inverted Files for text retrieval have previously shown several significant shortcomings of file signatures relative to inverted files. The inverted file approach underpins most state-of-the-art search engine algorithms, such as Language and Probabilistic models. It has been widely accepted that traditional file signatures are inferior alternatives to inverted files. This paper describes TopSig, a new approach to the construction of file signatures. Many advances in semantic hashing and dimensionality reduction have been made in recent times, but these were not so far linked to general purpose, signature file based, search engines. This paper introduces a different signature file approach that builds upon and extends these recent advances. We are able to demonstrate significant improvements in the performance of signature file based indexing and retrieval, performance that is comparable to that of state of the art inverted file based systems, including Language models and BM25. These findings suggest that file signatures offer a viable alternative to inverted files in suitable settings and from the theoretical perspective it positions the file signatures model in the class of Vector Space retrieval models.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, CIKM 201

Compressed Text Indexes:From Theory to Practice!

A compressed full-text self-index represents a text in a compressed form and still answers queries efficiently. This technology represents a breakthrough over the text indexing techniques of the previous decade, whose indexes required several times the size of the text. Although it is relatively new, this technology has matured up to a point where theoretical research is giving way to practical developments. Nonetheless this requires significant programming skills, a deep engineering effort, and a strong algorithmic background to dig into the research results. To date only isolated implementations and focused comparisons of compressed indexes have been reported, and they missed a common API, which prevented their re-use or deployment within other applications. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap. First, we present the existing implementations of compressed indexes from a practitioner's point of view. Second, we introduce the Pizza&Chili site, which offers tuned implementations and a standardized API for the most successful compressed full-text self-indexes, together with effective testbeds and scripts for their automatic validation and test. Third, we show the results of our extensive experiments on these codes with the aim of demonstrating the practical relevance of this novel and exciting technology

Compressed materialised views of semi-structured data

Query performance issues over semi-structured data have led to the emergence of materialised XML views as a means of restricting the data structure processed by a query. However preserving the conventional representation of such views remains a significant limiting factor especially in the context of mobile devices where processing power, memory usage and bandwidth are significant factors. To explore the concept of a compressed materialised view, we extend our earlier work on structural XML compression to produce a combination of structural summarisation and data compression techniques. These techniques provide a basis for efficiently dealing with both structural queries and valuebased predicates. We evaluate the effectiveness of such a scheme, presenting results and performance measures that show advantages of using such structures