191 research outputs found
Prospects and limitations of full-text index structures in genome analysis
The combination of incessant advances in sequencing technology producing large amounts of data and innovative bioinformatics approaches, designed to cope with this data flood, has led to new interesting results in the life sciences. Given the magnitude of sequence data to be processed, many bioinformatics tools rely on efficient solutions to a variety of complex string problems. These solutions include fast heuristic algorithms and advanced data structures, generally referred to as index structures. Although the importance of index structures is generally known to the bioinformatics community, the design and potency of these data structures, as well as their properties and limitations, are less understood. Moreover, the last decade has seen a boom in the number of variant index structures featuring complex and diverse memory-time trade-offs. This article brings a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of the most popular index structures and their recently developed variants. Their features, interrelationships, the trade-offs they impose, but also their practical limitations, are explained and compared
Optimal-Time Text Indexing in BWT-runs Bounded Space
Indexing highly repetitive texts --- such as genomic databases, software
repositories and versioned text collections --- has become an important problem
since the turn of the millennium. A relevant compressibility measure for
repetitive texts is , the number of runs in their Burrows-Wheeler Transform
(BWT). One of the earliest indexes for repetitive collections, the Run-Length
FM-index, used space and was able to efficiently count the number of
occurrences of a pattern of length in the text (in loglogarithmic time per
pattern symbol, with current techniques). However, it was unable to locate the
positions of those occurrences efficiently within a space bounded in terms of
. Since then, a number of other indexes with space bounded by other measures
of repetitiveness --- the number of phrases in the Lempel-Ziv parse, the size
of the smallest grammar generating the text, the size of the smallest automaton
recognizing the text factors --- have been proposed for efficiently locating,
but not directly counting, the occurrences of a pattern. In this paper we close
this long-standing problem, showing how to extend the Run-Length FM-index so
that it can locate the occurrences efficiently within space (in
loglogarithmic time each), and reaching optimal time within
space, on a RAM machine of bits. Within
space, our index can also count in optimal time .
Raising the space to , we support count and locate in
and time, which is optimal in the
packed setting and had not been obtained before in compressed space. We also
describe a structure using space that replaces the text and
extracts any text substring of length in almost-optimal time
. (...continues...
Universal Indexes for Highly Repetitive Document Collections
Indexing highly repetitive collections has become a relevant problem with the
emergence of large repositories of versioned documents, among other
applications. These collections may reach huge sizes, but are formed mostly of
documents that are near-copies of others. Traditional techniques for indexing
these collections fail to properly exploit their regularities in order to
reduce space.
We introduce new techniques for compressing inverted indexes that exploit
this near-copy regularity. They are based on run-length, Lempel-Ziv, or grammar
compression of the differential inverted lists, instead of the usual practice
of gap-encoding them. We show that, in this highly repetitive setting, our
compression methods significantly reduce the space obtained with classical
techniques, at the price of moderate slowdowns. Moreover, our best methods are
universal, that is, they do not need to know the versioning structure of the
collection, nor that a clear versioning structure even exists.
We also introduce compressed self-indexes in the comparison. These are
designed for general strings (not only natural language texts) and represent
the text collection plus the index structure (not an inverted index) in
integrated form. We show that these techniques can compress much further, using
a small fraction of the space required by our new inverted indexes. Yet, they
are orders of magnitude slower.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
Indexing Highly Repetitive String Collections
Two decades ago, a breakthrough in indexing string collections made it
possible to represent them within their compressed space while at the same time
offering indexed search functionalities. As this new technology permeated
through applications like bioinformatics, the string collections experienced a
growth that outperforms Moore's Law and challenges our ability of handling them
even in compressed form. It turns out, fortunately, that many of these rapidly
growing string collections are highly repetitive, so that their information
content is orders of magnitude lower than their plain size. The statistical
compression methods used for classical collections, however, are blind to this
repetitiveness, and therefore a new set of techniques has been developed in
order to properly exploit it. The resulting indexes form a new generation of
data structures able to handle the huge repetitive string collections that we
are facing.
In this survey we cover the algorithmic developments that have led to these
data structures. We describe the distinct compression paradigms that have been
used to exploit repetitiveness, the fundamental algorithmic ideas that form the
base of all the existing indexes, and the various structures that have been
proposed, comparing them both in theoretical and practical aspects. We conclude
with the current challenges in this fascinating field
Searching and Indexing Genomic Databases via Kernelization
The rapid advance of DNA sequencing technologies has yielded databases of
thousands of genomes. To search and index these databases effectively, it is
important that we take advantage of the similarity between those genomes.
Several authors have recently suggested searching or indexing only one
reference genome and the parts of the other genomes where they differ. In this
paper we survey the twenty-year history of this idea and discuss its relation
to kernelization in parameterized complexity
Heaviest Induced Ancestors and Longest Common Substrings
Suppose we have two trees on the same set of leaves, in which nodes are
weighted such that children are heavier than their parents. We say a node from
the first tree and a node from the second tree are induced together if they
have a common leaf descendant. In this paper we describe data structures that
efficiently support the following heaviest-induced-ancestor query: given a node
from the first tree and a node from the second tree, find an induced pair of
their ancestors with maximum combined weight. Our solutions are based on a
geometric interpretation that enables us to find heaviest induced ancestors
using range queries. We then show how to use these results to build an
LZ-compressed index with which we can quickly find with high probability a
longest substring common to the indexed string and a given pattern
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