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

R3D3: A doubly opportunistic data structure for compressing and indexing massive data

Opportunistic data structures are used extensively in big data practice to break down the massive storage space requirements of processing large volumes of information. A data structure is called (singly) opportunistic if it takes advantage of the redundancy in the input in order to store it in informationtheoretically minimum space. Yet, efficient data processing requires a separate index alongside the data, whose size often substantially exceeds that of the compressed information. In this paper, we introduce doubly opportunistic data structures to not only attain best possible compression on the input data but also on the index. We present R3D3 that encodes a bitvector of length n and Shannon entropy H0 to nH0 bits and the accompanying index to nH0(1/2 + O(log C/C)) bits, thus attaining provably minimum space (up to small error terms) on both the data and the index, and supports a rich set of queries to arbitrary position in the compressed bitvector in O(C) time when C = o(log n). Our R3D3 prototype attains several times space reduction beyond known compression techniques on a wide range of synthetic and real data sets, while it supports operations on the compressed data at comparable speed

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

High-Order Entropy-Compressed Text Indexes

We present a novel implementation of compressed su~x arrays exhibiting new tradeoffs between search time and space occupancy for a given text (or sequence) of n symbols over an alphabet E, where each symbol is encoded by lg ]E I bits. We show that compressed su1~x arrays use just nHh + O(n lglg n~ lgl~ I n) bits, while retaining full text indexing functionalities, such as searching any pattern sequence of length m in O(mlg [E[ + polylog(n)) time. The term Hh < lg IEI denotes the hth-order empirical entropy of the text, which means that our index is nearly optimal in space apart from lower-order terms, achieving asymptotically the empirical entropy of the text (with a multiplicative constant 1). If the text is highly compressible so that H~ = o(1) and the alphabet size is small, we obtain a text index with o(m) search time that requires only o(n) bits. Further results and tradeoffs are reported in the paper

A practical index for approximate dictionary matching with few mismatches

Approximate dictionary matching is a classic string matching problem (checking if a query string occurs in a collection of strings) with applications in, e.g., spellchecking, online catalogs, geolocation, and web searchers. We present a surprisingly simple solution called a split index, which is based on the Dirichlet principle, for matching a keyword with few mismatches, and experimentally show that it offers competitive space-time tradeoffs. Our implementation in the C++ language is focused mostly on data compaction, which is beneficial for the search speed (e.g., by being cache friendly). We compare our solution with other algorithms and we show that it performs better for the Hamming distance. Query times in the order of 1 microsecond were reported for one mismatch for the dictionary size of a few megabytes on a medium-end PC. We also demonstrate that a basic compression technique consisting in $q$-gram substitution can significantly reduce the index size (up to 50% of the input text size for the DNA), while still keeping the query time relatively low