Isomorphism of graph classes related to the circular-ones property

We give a linear-time algorithm that checks for isomorphism between two 0-1 matrices that obey the circular-ones property. This algorithm leads to linear-time isomorphism algorithms for related graph classes, including Helly circular-arc graphs, \Gamma-circular-arc graphs, proper circular-arc graphs and convex-round graphs.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figure

Computing the original eBWT faster, simpler, and with less memory

Mantaci et al. [TCS 2007] defined the eBWT to extend the definition of the BWT to a collection of strings, however, since this introduction, it has been used more generally to describe any BWT of a collection of strings and the fundamental property of the original definition (i.e., the independence from the input order) is frequently disregarded. In this paper, we propose a simple linear-time algorithm for the construction of the original eBWT, which does not require the preprocessing of Bannai et al. [CPM 2021]. As a byproduct, we obtain the first linear-time algorithm for computing the BWT of a single string that uses neither an end-of-string symbol nor Lyndon rotations. We combine our new eBWT construction with a variation of prefix-free parsing to allow for scalable construction of the eBWT. We evaluate our algorithm (pfpebwt) on sets of human chromosomes 19, Salmonella, and SARS-CoV2 genomes, and demonstrate that it is the fastest method for all collections, with a maximum speedup of 7.6x on the second best method. The peak memory is at most 2x larger than the second best method. Comparing with methods that are also, as our algorithm, able to report suffix array samples, we obtain a 57.1x improvement in peak memory. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/davidecenzato/PFP-eBWT.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

The Alternating BWT: An algorithmic perspective

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is a word transformation introduced in 1994 for Data Compression. It has become a fundamental tool for designing self-indexing data structures, with important applications in several areas in science and engineering. The Alternating Burrows-Wheeler Transform (ABWT) is another transformation recently introduced in Gessel et al. (2012) [21] and studied in the field of Combinatorics on Words. It is analogous to the BWT, except that it uses an alternating lexicographical order instead of the usual one. Building on results in Giancarlo et al. (2018) [23], where we have shown that BWT and ABWT are part of a larger class of reversible transformations, here we provide a combinatorial and algorithmic study of the novel transform ABWT. We establish a deep analogy between BWT and ABWT by proving they are the only ones in the above mentioned class to be rank-invertible, a novel notion guaranteeing efficient invertibility. In addition, we show that the backward-search procedure can be efficiently generalized to the ABWT; this result implies that also the ABWT can be used as a basis for efficient compressed full text indices. Finally, we prove that the ABWT can be efficiently computed by using a combination of the Difference Cover suffix sorting algorithm (K\ue4rkk\ue4inen et al., 2006 [28]) with a linear time algorithm for finding the minimal cyclic rotation of a word with respect to the alternating lexicographical order

Processing and indexing large biological datasets using the Burrows-Wheeler Transform of string collections

In the last few decades, the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies (NGS) has dramatically reduced the cost of DNA sequencing. This has made it possible to sequence many genomes in very little time, paving the way for projects which aim at the creation of large and repetitive collections of genomic sequences. The abundance of biological data is driving the development of new memory-efficient algorithms and data structures that can scale for large datasets, thus tackling the high computational burden related to processing these data. This trend has a strong impact on the text algorithms area. In this thesis, we will study the Burrows-Wheeler Transform for processing, indexing, and compressing collections of strings. Data compression addresses the problem of encoding the input to reduce the space needed for storing it, while text indexing focuses on finding ways to efficiently process and extract information from the data. In bioinformatics, these two concepts have been frequently used together since they allow the design of data structures that can efficiently process biological data while keeping the input compressed. The Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is a reversible transformation on strings introduced by Michael Burrows and David J. Wheeler in 1994 that plays a central role in this area. It is the key component of several compressed data structures for text processing, like the FM-index [Ferraggina and Manzini, SODA, 2000] or the r-index [Gagie et al., SODA, 2018], and some of the most important software in bioinformatics, such as the well-known Bowtie [Langmead et al., Genome Biology, 2009] and BWA [Li and Durbin, Bioinformatics, 2010]. The BWT was originally defined for individual strings, so when the focus moved from single sequences to string collections, there was the need to extend this transform. Over the years, several different tools and algorithms for computing BWT of string collections were introduced. However, even if the transforms generated by these tools frequently differ from each other, the problem of characterizing the BWT variants was never addressed properly. In this thesis, we close this gap by presenting the first systematic study of the BWT of string collections. We identified five non-equivalent variants computed by the tools in current use and analyzed their properties to show how exactly they differ. We complete our theoretical analysis by comparing the five BWT variants on several real-life biological datasets. We show that not only the differences among the resulting transforms can be extensive, but they also lead to significant changes in the compressibility of the BWT of the underlying string collection. As a further complication, the BWT variants in use often depend on the input order of the sequences. This significantly impacts the number of runs r, which defines the size of BWT-based compressed data structures. In this thesis, we address the problem of reordering the input sequences by providing the first implementation of the algorithm of Bentley et al. [ESA 2020], which computes the order minimizing the number of runs of the BWT. This leads to the creation of the first tool for computing the optimal BWT, i.e., the BWT variant which guarantees the minimum number of runs. We show experimentally that the input order can dramatically affect the final result: on our real-life datasets, the optimal BWT had up to 31 times fewer runs than the BWT computed without reordering the input sequences. The extended BWT (eBWT) of Mantaci et al. [Theor. Comput. Sci. 2007] is one of the first BWT variants explicitly designed to process string collections. Even though this transform is mathematically sound and has useful properties, its construction has been a problem for more than a decade. In this thesis, we present two linear-time algorithms for computing the eBWT of large string collections. The first is an improvement of the Bijective BWT construction algorithm of Bannai et al. [CPM 2019], while the second uses the Prefix-free parsing (PFP) method [Boucher et al., Algorithms Mol. Biol., 2019] to specifically process large and repetitive genomic sequence collections. In the final part of the thesis, we conclude by studying, for the first time, how to index string collections using the eBWT. We present the extended r-index, an extension of the r-index to the eBWT, which maintains the same performance as the original r-index while inheriting the properties of the eBWT. We implemented this data structure using a variant of the PFP algorithm and tested it on real-life biological datasets containing circular bacterial genomes and plasmids. We show experimentally that our index has competitive query times compared to the r-index on different pattern lengths while supporting advanced pattern matching functionalities on circular sequences