Prospects and limitations of full-text index structures in genome analysis

The combination of incessant advances in sequencing technology producing large amounts of data and innovative bioinformatics approaches, designed to cope with this data flood, has led to new interesting results in the life sciences. Given the magnitude of sequence data to be processed, many bioinformatics tools rely on efficient solutions to a variety of complex string problems. These solutions include fast heuristic algorithms and advanced data structures, generally referred to as index structures. Although the importance of index structures is generally known to the bioinformatics community, the design and potency of these data structures, as well as their properties and limitations, are less understood. Moreover, the last decade has seen a boom in the number of variant index structures featuring complex and diverse memory-time trade-offs. This article brings a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of the most popular index structures and their recently developed variants. Their features, interrelationships, the trade-offs they impose, but also their practical limitations, are explained and compared

Universal Compressed Text Indexing

The rise of repetitive datasets has lately generated a lot of interest in compressed self-indexes based on dictionary compression, a rich and heterogeneous family that exploits text repetitions in different ways. For each such compression scheme, several different indexing solutions have been proposed in the last two decades. To date, the fastest indexes for repetitive texts are based on the run-length compressed Burrows-Wheeler transform and on the Compact Directed Acyclic Word Graph. The most space-efficient indexes, on the other hand, are based on the Lempel-Ziv parsing and on grammar compression. Indexes for more universal schemes such as collage systems and macro schemes have not yet been proposed. Very recently, Kempa and Prezza [STOC 2018] showed that all dictionary compressors can be interpreted as approximation algorithms for the smallest string attractor, that is, a set of text positions capturing all distinct substrings. Starting from this observation, in this paper we develop the first universal compressed self-index, that is, the first indexing data structure based on string attractors, which can therefore be built on top of any dictionary-compressed text representation. Let $\gamma$ be the size of a string attractor for a text of length $n$. Our index takes $O(\gamma\log(n/\gamma))$ words of space and supports locating the $occ$ occurrences of any pattern of length $m$ in $O(m\log n + occ\log^{\epsilon}n)$ time, for any constant $\epsilon>0$. This is, in particular, the first index for general macro schemes and collage systems. Our result shows that the relation between indexing and compression is much deeper than what was previously thought: the simple property standing at the core of all dictionary compressors is sufficient to support fast indexed queries.Comment: Fixed with reviewer's comment

Universal lossless source coding with the Burrows Wheeler transform

The Burrows Wheeler transform (1994) is a reversible sequence transformation used in a variety of practical lossless source-coding algorithms. In each, the BWT is followed by a lossless source code that attempts to exploit the natural ordering of the BWT coefficients. BWT-based compression schemes are widely touted as low-complexity algorithms giving lossless coding rates better than those of the Ziv-Lempel codes (commonly known as LZ'77 and LZ'78) and almost as good as those achieved by prediction by partial matching (PPM) algorithms. To date, the coding performance claims have been made primarily on the basis of experimental results. This work gives a theoretical evaluation of BWT-based coding. The main results of this theoretical evaluation include: (1) statistical characterizations of the BWT output on both finite strings and sequences of length n → ∞, (2) a variety of very simple new techniques for BWT-based lossless source coding, and (3) proofs of the universality and bounds on the rates of convergence of both new and existing BWT-based codes for finite-memory and stationary ergodic sources. The end result is a theoretical justification and validation of the experimentally derived conclusions: BWT-based lossless source codes achieve universal lossless coding performance that converges to the optimal coding performance more quickly than the rate of convergence observed in Ziv-Lempel style codes and, for some BWT-based codes, within a constant factor of the optimal rate of convergence for finite-memory source

Computing LZ77 in Run-Compressed Space

In this paper, we show that the LZ77 factorization of a text T {\in\Sigma^n} can be computed in O(R log n) bits of working space and O(n log R) time, R being the number of runs in the Burrows-Wheeler transform of T reversed. For extremely repetitive inputs, the working space can be as low as O(log n) bits: exponentially smaller than the text itself. As a direct consequence of our result, we show that a class of repetition-aware self-indexes based on a combination of run-length encoded BWT and LZ77 can be built in asymptotically optimal O(R + z) words of working space, z being the size of the LZ77 parsing

Bidirectional Text Compression in External Memory

Bidirectional compression algorithms work by substituting repeated substrings by references that, unlike in the famous LZ77-scheme, can point to either direction. We present such an algorithm that is particularly suited for an external memory implementation. We evaluate it experimentally on large data sets of size up to 128 GiB (using only 16 GiB of RAM) and show that it is significantly faster than all known LZ77 compressors, while producing a roughly similar number of factors. We also introduce an external memory decompressor for texts compressed with any uni- or bidirectional compression scheme

Universal Indexes for Highly Repetitive Document Collections

Indexing highly repetitive collections has become a relevant problem with the emergence of large repositories of versioned documents, among other applications. These collections may reach huge sizes, but are formed mostly of documents that are near-copies of others. Traditional techniques for indexing these collections fail to properly exploit their regularities in order to reduce space. We introduce new techniques for compressing inverted indexes that exploit this near-copy regularity. They are based on run-length, Lempel-Ziv, or grammar compression of the differential inverted lists, instead of the usual practice of gap-encoding them. We show that, in this highly repetitive setting, our compression methods significantly reduce the space obtained with classical techniques, at the price of moderate slowdowns. Moreover, our best methods are universal, that is, they do not need to know the versioning structure of the collection, nor that a clear versioning structure even exists. We also introduce compressed self-indexes in the comparison. These are designed for general strings (not only natural language texts) and represent the text collection plus the index structure (not an inverted index) in integrated form. We show that these techniques can compress much further, using a small fraction of the space required by our new inverted indexes. Yet, they are orders of magnitude slower.Comment: This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sk{\l}odowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 BIRDS GA No. 69094