Optimal Substring-Equality Queries with Applications to Sparse Text Indexing

We consider the problem of encoding a string of length $n$ from an integer alphabet of size $\sigma$ so that access and substring equality queries (that is, determining the equality of any two substrings) can be answered efficiently. Any uniquely-decodable encoding supporting access must take $n\log\sigma + \Theta(\log (n\log\sigma))$ bits. We describe a new data structure matching this lower bound when $\sigma\leq n^{O(1)}$ while supporting both queries in optimal $O(1)$ time. Furthermore, we show that the string can be overwritten in-place with this structure. The redundancy of $\Theta(\log n)$ bits and the constant query time break exponentially a lower bound that is known to hold in the read-only model. Using our new string representation, we obtain the first in-place subquadratic (indeed, even sublinear in some cases) algorithms for several string-processing problems in the restore model: the input string is rewritable and must be restored before the computation terminates. In particular, we describe the first in-place subquadratic Monte Carlo solutions to the sparse suffix sorting, sparse LCP array construction, and suffix selection problems. With the sole exception of suffix selection, our algorithms are also the first running in sublinear time for small enough sets of input suffixes. Combining these solutions, we obtain the first sublinear-time Monte Carlo algorithm for building the sparse suffix tree in compact space. We also show how to derandomize our algorithms using small space. This leads to the first Las Vegas in-place algorithm computing the full LCP array in $O(n\log n)$ time and to the first Las Vegas in-place algorithms solving the sparse suffix sorting and sparse LCP array construction problems in $O(n^{1.5}\sqrt{\log \sigma})$ time. Running times of these Las Vegas algorithms hold in the worst case with high probability.Comment: Refactored according to TALG's reviews. New w.h.p. bounds and Las Vegas algorithm

Communication Efficient Checking of Big Data Operations

We propose fast probabilistic algorithms with low (i.e., sublinear in the input size) communication volume to check the correctness of operations in Big Data processing frameworks and distributed databases. Our checkers cover many of the commonly used operations, including sum, average, median, and minimum aggregation, as well as sorting, union, merge, and zip. An experimental evaluation of our implementation in Thrill (Bingmann et al., 2016) confirms the low overhead and high failure detection rate predicted by theoretical analysis

A New Approach to Speeding Up Topic Modeling

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a widely-used probabilistic topic modeling paradigm, and recently finds many applications in computer vision and computational biology. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate batch algorithm, active belief propagation (ABP), for training LDA. Usually batch LDA algorithms require repeated scanning of the entire corpus and searching the complete topic space. To process massive corpora having a large number of topics, the training iteration of batch LDA algorithms is often inefficient and time-consuming. To accelerate the training speed, ABP actively scans the subset of corpus and searches the subset of topic space for topic modeling, therefore saves enormous training time in each iteration. To ensure accuracy, ABP selects only those documents and topics that contribute to the largest residuals within the residual belief propagation (RBP) framework. On four real-world corpora, ABP performs around $10$ to $100$ times faster than state-of-the-art batch LDA algorithms with a comparable topic modeling accuracy.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure

Data-Oblivious Graph Algorithms in Outsourced External Memory

Motivated by privacy preservation for outsourced data, data-oblivious external memory is a computational framework where a client performs computations on data stored at a semi-trusted server in a way that does not reveal her data to the server. This approach facilitates collaboration and reliability over traditional frameworks, and it provides privacy protection, even though the server has full access to the data and he can monitor how it is accessed by the client. The challenge is that even if data is encrypted, the server can learn information based on the client data access pattern; hence, access patterns must also be obfuscated. We investigate privacy-preserving algorithms for outsourced external memory that are based on the use of data-oblivious algorithms, that is, algorithms where each possible sequence of data accesses is independent of the data values. We give new efficient data-oblivious algorithms in the outsourced external memory model for a number of fundamental graph problems. Our results include new data-oblivious external-memory methods for constructing minimum spanning trees, performing various traversals on rooted trees, answering least common ancestor queries on trees, computing biconnected components, and forming open ear decompositions. None of our algorithms make use of constant-time random oracles.Comment: 20 page