Constructing Antidictionaries in Output-Sensitive Space

A word x that is absent from a word y is called minimal if all its proper factors occur in y. Given a collection of k words y_1,y_2,...,y_k over an alphabet Σ, we are asked to compute the set M^ℓ_y_1#...#y_k of minimal absent words of length at most ℓ of word y=y_1#y_2#...#y_k, #∉Σ. In data compression, this corresponds to computing the antidictionary of k documents. In bioinformatics, it corresponds to computing words that are absent from a genome of k chromosomes. This computation generally requires Ω(n) space for n=|y| using any of the plenty available O(n)-time algorithms. This is because an Ω(n)-sized text index is constructed over y which can be impractical for large n. We do the identical computation incrementally using output-sensitive space. This goal is reasonable when ||M^ℓ_y_1#...#y_N||=o(n), for all N∈[1,k]. For instance, in the human genome, n ≈ 3× 10^9 but ||M^12_y_1#...#y_k|| ≈ 10^6. We consider a constant-sized alphabet for stating our results. We show that all M^ℓ_y_1,...,M^ℓ_y_1#...#y_k can be computed in O(kn+∑^k_N=1||M^ℓ_y_1#...#y_N||) total time using O(MaxIn+MaxOut) space, where MaxIn is the length of the longest word in {y_1,...,y_k} and MaxOut={||M^ℓ_y_1#...#y_N||:N∈[1,k]}. Proof-of-concept experimental results are also provided confirming our theoretical findings and justifying our contribution

Substring Complexity in Sublinear Space

Shannon's entropy is a definitive lower bound for statistical compression. Unfortunately, no such clear measure exists for the compressibility of repetitive strings. Thus, ad-hoc measures are employed to estimate the repetitiveness of strings, e.g., the size $z$ of the Lempel-Ziv parse or the number $r$ of equal-letter runs of the Burrows-Wheeler transform. A more recent one is the size $\gamma$ of a smallest string attractor. Unfortunately, Kempa and Prezza [STOC 2018] showed that computing $\gamma$ is NP-hard. Kociumaka et al. [LATIN 2020] considered a new measure that is based on the function $S_T$ counting the cardinalities of the sets of substrings of each length of $T$, also known as the substring complexity. This new measure is defined as $\delta= \sup\{S_T(k)/k, k\geq 1\}$ and lower bounds all the measures previously considered. In particular, $\delta\leq \gamma$ always holds and $\delta$ can be computed in $\mathcal{O}(n)$ time using $\Omega(n)$ working space. Kociumaka et al. showed that if $\delta$ is given, one can construct an $\mathcal{O}(\delta \log \frac{n}{\delta})$-sized representation of $T$ supporting efficient direct access and efficient pattern matching queries on $T$. Given that for highly compressible strings, $\delta$ is significantly smaller than $n$, it is natural to pose the following question: Can we compute $\delta$ efficiently using sublinear working space? It is straightforward to show that any algorithm computing $\delta$ using $\mathcal{O}(b)$ space requires $\Omega(n^{2-o(1)}/b)$ time through a reduction from the element distinctness problem [Yao, SIAM J. Comput. 1994]. We present the following results: an $\mathcal{O}(n^3/b^2)$-time and $\mathcal{O}(b)$-space algorithm to compute $\delta$, for any $b\in[1,n]$; and an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^2/b)$-time and $\mathcal{O}(b)$-space algorithm to compute $\delta$, for any $b\in[n^{2/3},n]$

Internal Shortest Absent Word Queries in Constant Time and Linear Space

International audienceGiven a string T of length n over an alphabet Σ ⊂ {1, 2,. .. , n O(1) } of size σ, we are to preprocess T so that given a range [i, j], we can return a representation of a shortest string over Σ that is absent in the fragment T [i] • • • T [j] of T. We present an O(n)-space data structure that answers such queries in constant time and can be constructed in O(n log σ n) time