Engineering External Memory LCP Array Construction: Parallel, In-Place and Large Alphabet

The suffix array augmented with the LCP array is perhaps the most important data structure in modern string processing. There has been a lot of recent research activity on constructing these arrays in external memory. In this paper, we engineer the two fastest LCP array construction algorithms (ESA 2016) and improve them in three ways. First, we speed up the algorithms by up to a factor of two through parallelism. Just 8 threads is sufficient for making the algorithms essentially I/O bound. Second, we reduce the disk space usage of the algorithms making them in-place: The input (text and suffix array) is treated as read-only and the working disk space never exceeds the size of the final output (the LCP array). Third, we add support for large alphabets. All previous implementations assume the byte alphabet

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

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

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

Linear-Space Data Structures for Range Mode Query in Arrays

A mode of a multiset $S$ is an element $a \in S$ of maximum multiplicity; that is, $a$ occurs at least as frequently as any other element in $S$. Given a list $A[1:n]$ of $n$ items, we consider the problem of constructing a data structure that efficiently answers range mode queries on $A$. Each query consists of an input pair of indices $(i, j)$ for which a mode of $A[i:j]$ must be returned. We present an $O(n^{2-2\epsilon})$-space static data structure that supports range mode queries in $O(n^\epsilon)$ time in the worst case, for any fixed $\epsilon \in [0,1/2]$. When $\epsilon = 1/2$, this corresponds to the first linear-space data structure to guarantee $O(\sqrt{n})$ query time. We then describe three additional linear-space data structures that provide $O(k)$, $O(m)$, and $O(|j-i|)$ query time, respectively, where $k$ denotes the number of distinct elements in $A$ and $m$ denotes the frequency of the mode of $A$. Finally, we examine generalizing our data structures to higher dimensions.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Sorting suffixes of a text via its Lyndon Factorization

The process of sorting the suffixes of a text plays a fundamental role in Text Algorithms. They are used for instance in the constructions of the Burrows-Wheeler transform and the suffix array, widely used in several fields of Computer Science. For this reason, several recent researches have been devoted to finding new strategies to obtain effective methods for such a sorting. In this paper we introduce a new methodology in which an important role is played by the Lyndon factorization, so that the local suffixes inside factors detected by this factorization keep their mutual order when extended to the suffixes of the whole word. This property suggests a versatile technique that easily can be adapted to different implementative scenarios.Comment: Submitted to the Prague Stringology Conference 2013 (PSC 2013

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