Document Retrieval on Repetitive Collections

Document retrieval aims at finding the most important documents where a pattern appears in a collection of strings. Traditional pattern-matching techniques yield brute-force document retrieval solutions, which has motivated the research on tailored indexes that offer near-optimal performance. However, an experimental study establishing which alternatives are actually better than brute force, and which perform best depending on the collection characteristics, has not been carried out. In this paper we address this shortcoming by exploring the relationship between the nature of the underlying collection and the performance of current methods. Via extensive experiments we show that established solutions are often beaten in practice by brute-force alternatives. We also design new methods that offer superior time/space trade-offs, particularly on repetitive collections.Comment: Accepted to ESA 2014. Implementation and experiments at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/suds/rlcsa

Indexing Finite Language Representation of Population Genotypes

With the recent advances in DNA sequencing, it is now possible to have complete genomes of individuals sequenced and assembled. This rich and focused genotype information can be used to do different population-wide studies, now first time directly on whole genome level. We propose a way to index population genotype information together with the complete genome sequence, so that one can use the index to efficiently align a given sequence to the genome with all plausible genotype recombinations taken into account. This is achieved through converting a multiple alignment of individual genomes into a finite automaton recognizing all strings that can be read from the alignment by switching the sequence at any time. The finite automaton is indexed with an extension of Burrows-Wheeler transform to allow pattern search inside the plausible recombinant sequences. The size of the index stays limited, because of the high similarity of individual genomes. The index finds applications in variation calling and in primer design. On a variation calling experiment, we found about 1.0% of matches to novel recombinants just with exact matching, and up to 2.4% with approximate matching.Comment: This is the full version of the paper that was presented at WABI 2011. The implementation is available at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/suds/gcsa

Universal Compressed Text Indexing

The rise of repetitive datasets has lately generated a lot of interest in compressed self-indexes based on dictionary compression, a rich and heterogeneous family that exploits text repetitions in different ways. For each such compression scheme, several different indexing solutions have been proposed in the last two decades. To date, the fastest indexes for repetitive texts are based on the run-length compressed Burrows-Wheeler transform and on the Compact Directed Acyclic Word Graph. The most space-efficient indexes, on the other hand, are based on the Lempel-Ziv parsing and on grammar compression. Indexes for more universal schemes such as collage systems and macro schemes have not yet been proposed. Very recently, Kempa and Prezza [STOC 2018] showed that all dictionary compressors can be interpreted as approximation algorithms for the smallest string attractor, that is, a set of text positions capturing all distinct substrings. Starting from this observation, in this paper we develop the first universal compressed self-index, that is, the first indexing data structure based on string attractors, which can therefore be built on top of any dictionary-compressed text representation. Let $\gamma$ be the size of a string attractor for a text of length $n$. Our index takes $O(\gamma\log(n/\gamma))$ words of space and supports locating the $occ$ occurrences of any pattern of length $m$ in $O(m\log n + occ\log^{\epsilon}n)$ time, for any constant $\epsilon>0$. This is, in particular, the first index for general macro schemes and collage systems. Our result shows that the relation between indexing and compression is much deeper than what was previously thought: the simple property standing at the core of all dictionary compressors is sufficient to support fast indexed queries.Comment: Fixed with reviewer's comment