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

Efficient Construction of the BWT for Repetitive Text Using String Compression

Funding Information: Funding Diego Díaz-Domínguez: Academy of Finland Grant 323233 Gonzalo Navarro: ANID Basal Funds FB0001 and Fondecyt Grant 1-200038, Chile Publisher Copyright: © Diego Daz-Domnguez and Gonzalo Navarro; licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY 4.0We present a new semi-external algorithm that builds the Burrows-Wheeler transform variant of Bauer et al. (a.k.a., BCR BWT) in linear expected time. Our method uses compression techniques to reduce the computational costs when the input is massive and repetitive. Concretely, we build on induced suffix sorting (ISS) and resort to run-length and grammar compression to maintain our intermediate results in compact form. Our compression format not only saves space, but it also speeds up the required computations. Our experiments show important savings in both space and computation time when the text is repetitive. On average, we are 3.7x faster than the baseline compressed approach, while maintaining a similar memory consumption. These results make our method stand out as the only one (to our knowledge) that can build the BCR BWT of a collection of 25 human genomes (75 GB) in about 7.3 hours, and using only 27 GB of working memory.Peer reviewe

From Theory to Practice: Plug and Play with Succinct Data Structures

Engineering efficient implementations of compact and succinct structures is a time-consuming and challenging task, since there is no standard library of easy-to- use, highly optimized, and composable components. One consequence is that measuring the practical impact of new theoretical proposals is a difficult task, since older base- line implementations may not rely on the same basic components, and reimplementing from scratch can be very time-consuming. In this paper we present a framework for experimentation with succinct data structures, providing a large set of configurable components, together with tests, benchmarks, and tools to analyze resource requirements. We demonstrate the functionality of the framework by recomposing succinct solutions for document retrieval.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 3 table

Parallel Construction of Wavelet Trees on Multicore Architectures

The wavelet tree has become a very useful data structure to efficiently represent and query large volumes of data in many different domains, from bioinformatics to geographic information systems. One problem with wavelet trees is their construction time. In this paper, we introduce two algorithms that reduce the time complexity of a wavelet tree's construction by taking advantage of nowadays ubiquitous multicore machines. Our first algorithm constructs all the levels of the wavelet in parallel in $O(n)$ time and $O(n\lg\sigma + \sigma\lg n)$ bits of working space, where $n$ is the size of the input sequence and $\sigma$ is the size of the alphabet. Our second algorithm constructs the wavelet tree in a domain-decomposition fashion, using our first algorithm in each segment, reaching $O(\lg n)$ time and $O(n\lg\sigma + p\sigma\lg n/\lg\sigma)$ bits of extra space, where $p$ is the number of available cores. Both algorithms are practical and report good speedup for large real datasets.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

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

Faster External Memory LCP Array Construction

The suffix array, perhaps the most important data structure in modern string processing, needs to be augmented with the longest-common-prefix (LCP) array in many applications. Their construction is often a major bottleneck especially when the data is too big for internal memory. We describe two new algorithms for computing the LCP array from the suffix array in external memory. Experiments demonstrate that the new algorithms are about a factor of two faster than the fastest previous algorithm

Space efficient algorithms for string processing

The suffix array (SA), which is an array containing the suffixes of a string sorted into lexicographical order, was introduced in the late eighties as a space efficient alternative to the suffix tree. It has since emerged as a useful data structure in string processing problems such as pattern matching, pattern discovery, and data compression. The SA is often coupled with the longest-common-prefix (LCP) array that contains the length of the longest common prefixes between consecutive suffixes in the SA. When enhanced with the LCP array, the SA can provide efficient solutions to the above applications including a problem called pattern mining. To date, all the mining algorithms lie at either extreme of the efficiency spectrum: they are either fast and use enormous amounts of space, or they are compact and orders of magnitude slower. We present a mining algorithm that achieves the best of both these extremes, having runtime comparable to the fastest published algorithms while using less space than the most space efficient. In all these applications, the construction of the SA --- also known as suffix sorting --- is one of the main computational bottlenecks. Most papers describing the SA assume the SA fits in RAM memory, limiting their applications. The fastest algorithms in this large memory suffix sorting category use powerful pointer copying heuristics to expedite suffix sorting. Several space efficient algorithms have emerged in the last five years, where the trend is to use as little RAM as possible. They do so by finding a clever way to trade runtime, or by using slow compressed data structures, or by using external memory (disk), or some combination of these techniques. In this thesis, we focus on improving the runtime of a space efficient algorithm due to Kärkkäinen by adapting the heuristics from large memory suffix sorting to a semi-external setting. Also, pointer copying has been heavily used to speed up the construction of the SA, but not the LCP array. We also discuss our attempts of combining the pointer copying heuristics to an efficient LCP construction algorithm due to Kärkkäinen, Manzini and Puglisi. The Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) was discovered independently of the SA, but it is now known that the two data structures are deeply linked. The BWT is central to practical compression tools such as szip and bzip2. Many papers have been published on constructing the BWT either in RAM or in external memory but few on inverting the BWT to obtain the original string --- in fact none in external memory. For larger datasets, the existing traditional approaches cannot be used to invert the BWT. In such cases, we have to use disk. We close the gap between theory and practice by examining the problem of inverting the BWT efficiently on disk. We provide a practical implementation of the only theoretical proposal for the problem by Ferragina, Gagie and Manzini. We also provide new, faster solutions to the problem based on simple scanning and compression techniques