Lightweight LCP Construction for Very Large Collections of Strings

The longest common prefix array is a very advantageous data structure that, combined with the suffix array and the Burrows-Wheeler transform, allows to efficiently compute some combinatorial properties of a string useful in several applications, especially in biological contexts. Nowadays, the input data for many problems are big collections of strings, for instance the data coming from "next-generation" DNA sequencing (NGS) technologies. In this paper we present the first lightweight algorithm (called extLCP) for the simultaneous computation of the longest common prefix array and the Burrows-Wheeler transform of a very large collection of strings having any length. The computation is realized by performing disk data accesses only via sequential scans, and the total disk space usage never needs more than twice the output size, excluding the disk space required for the input. Moreover, extLCP allows to compute also the suffix array of the strings of the collection, without any other further data structure is needed. Finally, we test our algorithm on real data and compare our results with another tool capable to work in external memory on large collections of strings.Comment: This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The final version of this manuscript is in press in Journal of Discrete Algorithm

Low Space External Memory Construction of the Succinct Permuted Longest Common Prefix Array

The longest common prefix (LCP) array is a versatile auxiliary data structure in indexed string matching. It can be used to speed up searching using the suffix array (SA) and provides an implicit representation of the topology of an underlying suffix tree. The LCP array of a string of length $n$ can be represented as an array of length $n$ words, or, in the presence of the SA, as a bit vector of $2n$ bits plus asymptotically negligible support data structures. External memory construction algorithms for the LCP array have been proposed, but those proposed so far have a space requirement of $O(n)$ words (i.e. $O(n \log n)$ bits) in external memory. This space requirement is in some practical cases prohibitively expensive. We present an external memory algorithm for constructing the $2n$ bit version of the LCP array which uses $O(n \log \sigma)$ bits of additional space in external memory when given a (compressed) BWT with alphabet size $\sigma$ and a sampled inverse suffix array at sampling rate $O(\log n)$. This is often a significant space gain in practice where $\sigma$ is usually much smaller than $n$ or even constant. We also consider the case of computing succinct LCP arrays for circular strings

String Synchronizing Sets: Sublinear-Time BWT Construction and Optimal LCE Data Structure

Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) is an invertible text transformation that, given a text $T$ of length $n$, permutes its symbols according to the lexicographic order of suffixes of $T$. BWT is one of the most heavily studied algorithms in data compression with numerous applications in indexing, sequence analysis, and bioinformatics. Its construction is a bottleneck in many scenarios, and settling the complexity of this task is one of the most important unsolved problems in sequence analysis that has remained open for 25 years. Given a binary string of length $n$, occupying $O(n/\log n)$ machine words, the BWT construction algorithm due to Hon et al. (SIAM J. Comput., 2009) runs in $O(n)$ time and $O(n/\log n)$ space. Recent advancements (Belazzougui, STOC 2014, and Munro et al., SODA 2017) focus on removing the alphabet-size dependency in the time complexity, but they still require $\Omega(n)$ time. In this paper, we propose the first algorithm that breaks the $O(n)$-time barrier for BWT construction. Given a binary string of length $n$, our procedure builds the Burrows-Wheeler transform in $O(n/\sqrt{\log n})$ time and $O(n/\log n)$ space. We complement this result with a conditional lower bound proving that any further progress in the time complexity of BWT construction would yield faster algorithms for the very well studied problem of counting inversions: it would improve the state-of-the-art $O(m\sqrt{\log m})$-time solution by Chan and P\v{a}tra\c{s}cu (SODA 2010). Our algorithm is based on a novel concept of string synchronizing sets, which is of independent interest. As one of the applications, we show that this technique lets us design a data structure of the optimal size $O(n/\log n)$ that answers Longest Common Extension queries (LCE queries) in $O(1)$ time and, furthermore, can be deterministically constructed in the optimal $O(n/\log n)$ time.Comment: Full version of a paper accepted to STOC 201

Lightweight Lempel-Ziv Parsing

We introduce a new approach to LZ77 factorization that uses O(n/d) words of working space and O(dn) time for any d >= 1 (for polylogarithmic alphabet sizes). We also describe carefully engineered implementations of alternative approaches to lightweight LZ77 factorization. Extensive experiments show that the new algorithm is superior in most cases, particularly at the lowest memory levels and for highly repetitive data. As a part of the algorithm, we describe new methods for computing matching statistics which may be of independent interest.Comment: 12 page

Compressed Full-Text Indexes for Highly Repetitive Collections

This thesis studies problems related to compressed full-text indexes. A full-text index is a data structure for indexing textual (sequence) data, so that the occurrences of any query string in the data can be found efficiently. While most full-text indexes require much more space than the sequences they index, recent compressed indexes have overcome this limitation. These compressed indexes combine a compressed representation of the index with some extra information that allows decompressing any part of the data efficiently. This way, they provide similar functionality as the uncompressed indexes, while using only slightly more space than the compressed data. The efficiency of data compression is usually measured in terms of entropy. While entropy-based estimates predict the compressed size of most texts accurately, they fail with highly repetitive collections of texts. Examples of such collections include different versions of a document and the genomes of a number of individuals from the same population. While the entropy of a highly repetitive collection is usually similar to that of a text of the same kind, the collection can often be compressed much better than the entropy-based estimate. Most compressed full-text indexes are based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT). Originally intended for data compression, the BWT has deep connections with full-text indexes such as the suffix tree and the suffix array. With some additional information, these indexes can be simulated with the Burrows-Wheeler transform. The first contribution of this thesis is the first BWT-based index that can compress highly repetitive collections efficiently. Compressed indexes allow us to handle much larger data sets than the corresponding uncompressed indexes. To take full advantage of this, we need algorithms for constructing the compressed index directly, instead of first constructing an uncompressed index and then compressing it. The second contribution of this thesis is an algorithm for merging the BWT-based indexes of two text collections. By using this algorithm, we can derive better space-efficient construction algorithms for BWT-based indexes. The basic BWT-based indexes provide similar functionality as the suffix array. With some additional structures, the functionality can be extended to that of the suffix tree. One of the structures is an array storing the lengths of the longest common prefixes of lexicographically adjacent suffixes of the text. The third contribution of this thesis is a space-efficient algorithm for constructing this array, and a new compressed representation of the array. In the case of individual genomes, the highly repetitive collection can be considered a sample from a larger collection. This collection consists of a reference sequence and a set of possible differences from the reference, so that each sequence contains a subset of the differences. The fourth contribution of this thesis is a BWT-based index that extrapolates the larger collection from the sample and indexes it.Tässä väitöskirjassa käsitellään tiivistettyjä kokotekstihakemistoja tekstimuotoisille aineistoille. Kokotekstihakemistot ovat tietorakenteita, jotka mahdollistavat mielivaltaisten hahmojen esiintymien löytämisen tekstistä tehokkaasti. Perinteiset kokotekstihakemistot, kuten loppuosapuut ja -taulukot, vievät moninkertaisesti tilaa itse aineistoon nähden. Viime aikoina on kuitenkin kehitetty tiivistettyjä hakemistorakenteita, jotka tarjoavat vastaavan toiminnallisuuden alkuperäistä tekstiä pienemmässä tilassa. Tämä on mahdollistanut aikaisempaa suurempien aineistojen käsittelyn. Tekstin tiivistyvyyttä mitataan yleensä suhteessa sen entropiaan. Vaikka entropiaan perustuvat arviot ovat useimmilla aineistoilla varsin tarkkoja, aliarvioivat ne vahvasti toisteisien aineistojen tiivistyvyyttä. Esimerkkejä tällaisista aineistoista ovat kokoelmat saman populaation yksilöiden genomeita tai saman dokumentin eri versioita. Siinä missä tällaisen kokoelman entropia suhteessa aineiston kokoon on vastaava kuin yksittäisellä samaa tyyppiä olevalla tekstillä, tiivistyy kokoelma yleensä huomattavasti paremmin kuin entropian perusteella voisi odottaa. Useimmat tiivistetyt kokotekstihakemistot perustuvat Burrows-Wheeler-muunnokseen (BWT), joka kehitettiin alun perin tekstimuotoisten aineistojen tiivistämiseen. Pian kuitenkin havaittiin, että koska BWT muistuttaa rakenteeltaan loppuosapuuta ja -taulukkoa, voidaan sitä käyttää niissä tehtävien hakujen simulointiin. Tässä väitöskirjassa esitetään ensimmäinen BWT-pohjainen kokotekstihakemisto, joka pystyy tiivistämään vahvasti toisteiset aineistot tehokkaasti. Tiivistettyjen tietorakenteiden käyttö mahdollistaa suurempien aineistoiden käsittelemisen kuin tavallisia tietorakenteita käytettäessä. Tämä etu kuitenkin menetetään, jos tiivistetty tietorakenne muodostetaan luomalla ensin vastaava tavallinen tietorakenne ja tiivistämällä se. Tässä väitöskirjassa esitetään aikaisempaa vähemmän muistia käyttäviä algoritmeja BWT-pohjaisten kokotekstihakemistojen muodostamiseen. Kokoelma yksilöiden genomeita voidaan käsittää otokseksi suuremmasta kokoelmasta, joka koostuu populaation kaikkien yksilöiden sekä niiden hypoteettisten jälkeläisten genomeista. Tällainen kokoelma voidaan esittää äärellisenä automaattina, joka muodostuu referenssigenomista ja yksilöiden genomeissa esiintyvistä poikkeamista referenssistä. Tässä väitöskirjassa esitetään BWT-pohjaisten kokotekstihakemistojen yleistys, joka mahdollistaa tällaisten automaattien indeksoinnin