Suffix Structures and Circular Pattern Problems

The suffix tree is a data structure used to represent all the suffixes in a string. However, a major problem with the suffix tree is its practical space requirement. In this dissertation, we propose an efficient data structure -- the virtual suffix tree (VST) -- which requires less space than other recently proposed data structures for suffix trees and suffix arrays. On average, the space requirement (including that for suffix arrays and suffix links) is 13.8n bytes for the regular VST, and 12.05n bytes in its compact form, where n is the length of the sequence.;Markov models are very popular for modeling complex sequences. In this dissertation, we present the probabilistic suffix array (PSA), a space-efficient alternative to the probabilistic suffix tree (PST) used to represent Markov models. The PSA provides all the capabilities of the PST, such as learning and prediction, and maintains the same linear time construction (linearity with respect to sequence length). The PSA, however, has a significantly smaller memory requirement than the PST, for both the construction stage, and at the time of usage.;Using the proposed suffix data structures, we study the circular pattern matching (CPM) problem. We provide a linear time, linear space algorithm to solve the exact circular pattern matching problem. We then present four algorithms to address the approximate circular pattern matching (ACPM) problem. Our bidirectional ACPM algorithm provides the best time complexity when compared with other algorithms proposed in the literature. Further, we define the circular pattern discovery (CPD) problem and present algorithms to solve this problem. Using the proposed circular pattern matching algorithms, we perform experiments on computational analysis and function prediction for multidomain proteins

An Elegant Algorithm for the Construction of Suffix Arrays

The suffix array is a data structure that finds numerous applications in string processing problems for both linguistic texts and biological data. It has been introduced as a memory efficient alternative for suffix trees. The suffix array consists of the sorted suffixes of a string. There are several linear time suffix array construction algorithms (SACAs) known in the literature. However, one of the fastest algorithms in practice has a worst case run time of $O(n^2)$. The problem of designing practically and theoretically efficient techniques remains open. In this paper we present an elegant algorithm for suffix array construction which takes linear time with high probability; the probability is on the space of all possible inputs. Our algorithm is one of the simplest of the known SACAs and it opens up a new dimension of suffix array construction that has not been explored until now. Our algorithm is easily parallelizable. We offer parallel implementations on various parallel models of computing. We prove a lemma on the $\ell$-mers of a random string which might find independent applications. We also present another algorithm that utilizes the above algorithm. This algorithm is called RadixSA and has a worst case run time of $O(n\log{n})$. RadixSA introduces an idea that may find independent applications as a speedup technique for other SACAs. An empirical comparison of RadixSA with other algorithms on various datasets reveals that our algorithm is one of the fastest algorithms to date. The C++ source code is freely available at http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~man09004/radixSA.zi

Lyndon Array Construction during Burrows-Wheeler Inversion

In this paper we present an algorithm to compute the Lyndon array of a string $T$ of length $n$ as a byproduct of the inversion of the Burrows-Wheeler transform of $T$. Our algorithm runs in linear time using only a stack in addition to the data structures used for Burrows-Wheeler inversion. We compare our algorithm with two other linear-time algorithms for Lyndon array construction and show that computing the Burrows-Wheeler transform and then constructing the Lyndon array is competitive compared to the known approaches. We also propose a new balanced parenthesis representation for the Lyndon array that uses $2n+o(n)$ bits of space and supports constant time access. This representation can be built in linear time using $O(n)$ words of space, or in $O(n\log n/\log\log n)$ time using asymptotically the same space as $T$