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We introduce height-bounded LZ encodings (LZHB), a new family of compressed representations that are variants of Lempel-Ziv parsings with a focus on bounding the worst-case access time to arbitrary positions in the text directly via the compressed representation. An LZ-like encoding is a partitioning of the string into phrases of length $1$ which can be encoded literally, or phrases of length at least $2$ which have a previous occurrence in the string and can be encoded by its position and length. An LZ-like encoding induces an implicit referencing forest on the set of positions of the string. An LZHB encoding is an LZ-like encoding where the height of the implicit referencing forest is bounded. An LZHB encoding with height constraint $h$ allows access to an arbitrary position of the underlying text using $O(h)$ predecessor queries. While computing the smallest LZHB encoding efficiently seems to be difficult [Cicalese \& Ugazio 2024, arxiv], we give the first linear time algorithm for strings over a constant size alphabet that computes the greedy LZHB encoding, i.e., the string is processed from beginning to end, and the longest prefix of the remaining string that can satisfy the height constraint is taken as the next phrase. Our algorithms significantly improve both theoretically and practically, the very recently and independently proposed algorithms by Lipt\'ak et al. (arxiv, to appear at CPM 2024). We also analyze the size of height bounded LZ encodings in the context of repetitiveness measures, and show for some constant $c$, the size $z_{HB}$ of the optimal LZHB encoding with height bound $c\log n$ is $O(g_{rl})$, where $g_{rl}$ is the size of the smallest run-length grammar. We also show $z_{HB} = o(g_{rl})$ for some family of strings, making $z_{HB}$ one of the smallest known repetitiveness measures for which $O({\sf polylog} n)$ time access is possible using linear space., Comment: abstract shortened to fit arxiv requirements

The k-spectrum of a string is the set of all distinct substrings of length k occurring in the string. K-spectra have many applications in bioinformatics including pseudoalignment and genome assembly. The Spectral Burrows-Wheeler Transform (SBWT) has been recently introduced as an algorithmic tool to efficiently represent and query these objects. The longest common prefix (LCP) array for a k-spectrum is an array of length n that stores the length of the longest common prefix of adjacent k-mers as they occur in lexicographical order. The LCP array has at least two important applications, namely to accelerate pseudoalignment algorithms using the SBWT and to allow simulation of variable-order de Bruijn graphs within the SBWT framework. In this paper we explore algorithms to compute the LCP array efficiently from the SBWT representation of the k-spectrum. Starting with a straightforward O(nk) time algorithm, we describe algorithms that are efficient in both theory and practice. We show that the LCP array can be computed in optimal O(n) time, where n is the length of the SBWT of the spectrum. In practical genomics scenarios, we show that this theoretically optimal algorithm is indeed practical, but is often outperformed on smaller values of k by an asymptotically suboptimal algorithm that interacts better with the CPU cache. Our algorithms share some features with both classical Burrows-Wheeler inversion algorithms and LCP array construction algorithms for suffix arrays.

We describe an algorithm to find maximal exact matches (MEMs) among HiFi reads with homopolymer errors. The main novelty in our work is that we resort to run-length compression to help deal with errors. Our method receives as input a run-length-encoded string collection containing the HiFi reads along with their reverse complements. Subsequently, it splits the encoding into two arrays, one storing the sequence of symbols for equal-symbol runs and another storing the run lengths. The purpose of the split is to get the BWT of the run symbols and reorder their lengths accordingly. We show that this special BWT, as it encodes the HiFi reads and their reverse complements, supports bi-directional queries for the HiFi reads. Then, we propose a variation of the MEM algorithm of Belazzougui et al. (2013) that exploits the run-length encoding and the implicit bi-directional property of our BWT to compute approximate MEMs. Concretely, if the algorithm finds that two substrings, $a_1 \ldots a_p$ and $b_1 \ldots b_p$, have a MEM, then it reports the MEM only if their corresponding length sequences, $\ell^{a}_1 \ldots \ell^{a}_p$ and $\ell^{b}_1 \ldots \ell^{b}_p$, do not differ beyond an input threshold. We use a simple metric to calculate the similarity of the length sequences that we call the {\em run-length excess}. Our technique facilitates the detection of MEMs with homopolymer errors as it does not require dynamic programming to find approximate matches where the only edits are the lengths of the equal-symbol runs. Finally, we present a method that relies on a geometric data structure to report the text occurrences of the MEMs detected by our algorithm., Comment: Accepted in SPIRE'22

Relative Lempel-Ziv (RLZ) parsing is a dictionary compression method in which a string $S$ is compressed relative to a second string $R$ (called the reference) by parsing $S$ into a sequence of substrings that occur in $R$. RLZ is particularly effective at compressing sets of strings that have a high degree of similarity to the reference string, such as a set of genomes of individuals from the same species. With the now cheap cost of DNA sequencing, such data sets have become extremely abundant and are rapidly growing. In this paper, instead of using a single reference string for the entire collection, we investigate the use of different reference strings for subsets of the collection, with the aim of improving compression. In particular, we form a rooted tree (or hierarchy) on the strings and then compressed each string using RLZ with parent as reference, storing only the root of the tree in plain text. To decompress, we traverse the tree in BFS order starting at the root, decompressing children with respect to their parent. We show that this approach leads to a twofold improvement in compression on bacterial genome data sets, with negligible effect on decompression time compared to the standard single reference approach. We show that an effective hierarchy for a given set of strings can be constructed by computing the optimal arborescence of a completed weighted digraph of the strings, with weights as the number of phrases in the RLZ parsing of the source and destination vertices. We further show that instead of computing the complete graph, a sparse graph derived using locality sensitive hashing can significantly reduce the cost of computing a good hierarchy, without adversely effecting compression performance.

Given a string $T$ with length $n$ whose characters are drawn from an ordered alphabet of size $\sigma$, its longest Lyndon subsequence is a longest subsequence of $T$ that is a Lyndon word. We propose algorithms for finding such a subsequence in $O(n^3)$ time with $O(n)$ space, or online in $O(n^3 \sigma)$ space and time. Our first result can be extended to find the longest common Lyndon subsequence of two strings of length $n$ in $O(n^4 \sigma)$ time using $O(n^3)$ space.

The weighted ancestor problem is a well-known generalization of the predecessor problem to trees. It is known to require $\Omega(\log\log n)$ time for queries provided $O(n\mathop{\mathrm{polylog}} n)$ space is available and weights are from $[0..n]$, where $n$ is the number of tree nodes. However, when applied to suffix trees, the problem, surprisingly, admits an $O(n)$-space solution with constant query time, as was shown by Gawrychowski, Lewenstein, and Nicholson (Proc. ESA 2014). This variant of the problem can be reformulated as follows: given the suffix tree of a string $s$, we need a data structure that can locate in the tree any substring $s[p..q]$ of $s$ in $O(1)$ time (as if one descended from the root reading $s[p..q]$ along the way). Unfortunately, the data structure of Gawrychowski et al. has no efficient construction algorithm, limiting its wider usage as an algorithmic tool. In this paper we resolve this issue, describing a data structure for weighted ancestors in suffix trees with constant query time and a linear construction algorithm. Our solution is based on a novel approach using so-called irreducible LCP values., Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures

In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying patterns of interest in colored strings. A colored string is a string where each position is assigned one of a finite set of colors. Our task is to find substrings of the colored string that always occur followed by the same color at the same distance. The problem is motivated by applications in embedded systems verification, in particular, assertion mining. The goal there is to automatically find properties of the embedded system from the analysis of its simulation traces. We show that, in our setting, the number of patterns of interest is upper-bounded by $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$, where $n$ is the length of the string. We introduce a baseline algorithm, running in $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ time, which identifies all patterns of interest satisfying certain minimality conditions, for all colors in the string. For the case where one is interested in patterns related to one color only, we also provide a second algorithm which runs in $\mathcal{O}(n^2\log n)$ time in the worst case but is faster than the baseline algorithm in practice. Both solutions use suffix trees, and the second algorithm also uses an appropriately defined priority queue, which allows us to reduce the number of computations. We performed an experimental evaluation of the proposed approaches over both synthetic and real-world datasets, and found that the second algorithm outperforms the first algorithm on all simulated data, while on the real-world data, the performance varies between a slight slowdown (on half of the datasets) and a speedup by a factor of up to 11., Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, published in ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics. This is the journal version of the paper with the same title at SEA 2020 (18th Symposium on Experimental Algorithms, Catania, Italy, June 16-18, 2020)

We describe indexes for searching large data sets for variable-length-gapped (VLG) patterns. VLG patterns are composed of two or more subpatterns, between each adjacent pair of which is a gap-constraint specifying upper and lower bounds on the distance allowed between subpatterns. VLG patterns have numerous applications in computational biology (motif search), information retrieval (e.g., for language models, snippet generation, machine translation) and capture a useful subclass of the regular expressions commonly used in practice for searching source code. Our best approach provides search speeds several times faster than prior art across a broad range of patterns and texts., Comment: This research is supported by Academy of Finland through grant 319454 and has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 BIRDS GA No. 690941

Lempel-Ziv (LZ77 or, briefly, LZ) is one of the most effective and widely-used compressors for repetitive texts. However, the existing efficient methods computing the exact LZ parsing have to use linear or close to linear space to index the input text during the construction of the parsing, which is prohibitive for long inputs. An alternative is Relative Lempel-Ziv (RLZ), which indexes only a fixed reference sequence, whose size can be controlled. Deriving the reference sequence by sampling the text yields reasonable compression ratios for RLZ, but performance is not always competitive with that of LZ and depends heavily on the similarity of the reference to the text. In this paper we introduce ReLZ, a technique that uses RLZ as a preprocessor to approximate the LZ parsing using little memory. RLZ is first used to produce a sequence of phrases, and these are regarded as metasymbols that are input to LZ for a second-level parsing on a (most often) drastically shorter sequence. This parsing is finally translated into one on the original sequence. We analyze the new scheme and prove that, like LZ, it achieves the $k$th order empirical entropy compression $n H_k + o(n\log\sigma)$ with $k = o(\log_\sigma n)$, where $n$ is the input length and $\sigma$ is the alphabet size. In fact, we prove this entropy bound not only for ReLZ but for a wide class of LZ-like encodings. Then, we establish a lower bound on ReLZ approximation ratio showing that the number of phrases in it can be $\Omega(\log n)$ times larger than the number of phrases in LZ. Our experiments show that ReLZ is faster than existing alternatives to compute the (exact or approximate) LZ parsing, at the reasonable price of an approximation factor below $2.0$ in all tested scenarios, and sometimes below $1.05$, to the size of LZ., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

A string $S[1,n]$ is a power (or tandem repeat) of order $k$ and period $n/k$ if it can decomposed into $k$ consecutive equal-length blocks of letters. Powers and periods are fundamental to string processing, and algorithms for their efficient computation have wide application and are heavily studied. Recently, Fici et al. (Proc. ICALP 2016) defined an {\em anti-power} of order $k$ to be a string composed of $k$ pairwise-distinct blocks of the same length ($n/k$, called {\em anti-period}). Anti-powers are a natural converse to powers, and are objects of combinatorial interest in their own right. In this paper we initiate the algorithmic study of anti-powers. Given a string $S$, we describe an optimal algorithm for locating all substrings of $S$ that are anti-powers of a specified order. The optimality of the algorithm follows form a combinatorial lemma that provides a lower bound on the number of distinct anti-powers of a given order: we prove that a string of length $n$ can contain $\Theta(n^2/k)$ distinct anti-powers of order $k$.

De novo DNA assembly is a fundamental task in Bioinformatics, and finding Eulerian paths on de Bruijn graphs is one of the dominant approaches to it. In most of the cases, there may be no one order for the de Bruijn graph that works well for assembling all of the reads. For this reason, some de Bruijn-based assemblers try assembling on several graphs of increasing order, in turn. Boucher et al. (2015) went further and gave a representation making it possible to navigate in the graph and change order on the fly, up to a maximum $K$, but they can use up to $\lg K$ extra bits per edge because they use an LCP array. In this paper, we replace the LCP array by a succinct representation of that array's Cartesian tree, which takes only 2 extra bits per edge and still lets us support interesting navigation operations efficiently. These operations are not enough to let us easily extract unitigs and only unitigs from the graph but they do let us extract a set of safe strings that contains all unitigs. Suppose we are navigating in a variable-order de Bruijn graph representation, following these rules: if there are no outgoing edges then we reduce the order, hoping one appears; if there is exactly one outgoing edge then we take it (increasing the current order, up to $K$); if there are two or more outgoing edges then we stop. Then we traverse a (variable-order) path such that we cross edges only when we have no choice or, equivalently, we generate a string appending characters only when we have no choice. It follows that the strings we extract are safe. Our experiments show we extract a set of strings more informative than the unitigs, while using a reasonable amount of memory.

Given a string of length $n$ that is composed of $r$ runs of letters from the alphabet $\{0,1,\ldots,\sigma{-}1\}$ such that $2 \le \sigma \le r$, we describe a data structure that, provided $r \le n / \log^{\omega(1)} n$, stores the string in $r\log\frac{n\sigma}{r} + o(r\log\frac{n\sigma}{r})$ bits and supports select and access queries in $O(\log\frac{\log(n/r)}{\log\log n})$ time and rank queries in $O(\log\frac{\log(n\sigma/r)}{\log\log n})$ time. We show that $r\log\frac{n(\sigma-1)}{r} - O(\log\frac{n}{r})$ bits are necessary for any such data structure and, thus, our solution is succinct. We also describe a data structure that uses $(1 + \epsilon)r\log\frac{n\sigma}{r} + O(r)$ bits, where $\epsilon > 0$ is an arbitrary constant, with the same query times but without the restriction $r \le n / \log^{\omega(1)} n$. By simple reductions to the colored predecessor problem, we show that the query times are optimal in the important case $r \ge 2^{\log^\delta n}$, for an arbitrary constant $\delta > 0$. We implement our solution and compare it with the state of the art, showing that the closest competitors consume 31-46% more space., Comment: This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 BIRDS GA No. 690941. 10 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables; published in DCC'2018

We investigate two closely related LZ78-based compression schemes: LZMW (an old scheme by Miller and Wegman) and LZD (a recent variant by Goto et al.). Both LZD and LZMW naturally produce a grammar for a string of length $n$; we show that the size of this grammar can be larger than the size of the smallest grammar by a factor $\Omega(n^{\frac{1}3})$ but is always within a factor $O((\frac{n}{\log n})^{\frac{2}{3}})$. In addition, we show that the standard algorithms using $\Theta(z)$ working space to construct the LZD and LZMW parsings, where $z$ is the size of the parsing, work in $\Omega(n^{\frac{5}4})$ time in the worst case. We then describe a new Las Vegas LZD/LZMW parsing algorithm that uses $O (z \log n)$ space and $O(n + z \log^2 n)$ time w.h.p.., Comment: 12 pages, accepted to SPIRE 2017

We consider the problem of implementing a space-efficient dynamic trie, with an emphasis on good practical performance. For a trie with $n$ nodes with an alphabet of size $\sigma$, the information-theoretic lower bound is $n \log \sigma + O(n)$ bits. The Bonsai data structure is a compact trie proposed by Darragh et al. (Softw., Pract. Exper. 23(3), 1993, p. 277-291). Its disadvantages include the user having to specify an upper bound $M$ on the trie size in advance (which cannot be changed easily after initalization), a space usage of $M \log \sigma + O(M \log \log M)$ (which is asymptotically non-optimal for smaller $\sigma$ or if $n \ll M$) and a lack of support for deletions. It supports traversal and update operations in $O(1/\epsilon)$ expected time (based on assumptions about the behaviour of hash functions), where $\epsilon = (M-n)/M$ and has excellent speed performance in practice. We propose an alternative, m-Bonsai, that addresses the above problems, obtaining a trie that uses $(1+\beta) n (\log \sigma + O(1))$ bits in expectation, and supports traversal and update operations in $O(1/\beta)$ expected time and $O(1/\beta^2)$ amortized expected time, for any user-specified parameter $\beta > 0$ (again based on assumptions about the behaviour of hash functions). We give an implementation of m-Bonsai which uses considerably less memory and is slightly faster than the original Bonsai., Comment: Journal version of SPIRE 2015 paper by Poyias and Raman

Similarity search over chemical compound databases is a fundamental task in the discovery and design of novel drug-like molecules. Such databases often encode molecules as non-negative integer vectors, called molecular descriptors, which represent rich information on various molecular properties. While there exist efficient indexing structures for searching databases of binary vectors, solutions for more general integer vectors are in their infancy. In this paper we present a time- and space- efficient index for the problem that we call the succinct intervals-splitting tree algorithm for molecular descriptors (SITAd). Our approach extends efficient methods for binary-vector databases, and uses ideas from succinct data structures. Our experiments, on a large database of over 40 million compounds, show SITAd significantly outperforms alternative approaches in practice., Comment: To be appeared in the Proceedings of SISAP'17

Lyndon factorization and Lempel-Ziv (LZ) factorization are both important tools for analysing the structure and complexity of strings, but their combinatorial structure is very different. In this paper, we establish the first direct connection between the two by showing that while the Lyndon factorization can be bigger than the non-overlapping LZ factorization (which we demonstrate by describing a new, non-trivial family of strings) it is never more than twice the size., Comment: 12 pages

With massive high-dimensional data now commonplace in research and industry, there is a strong and growing demand for more scalable computational techniques for data analysis and knowledge discovery. Key to turning these data into knowledge is the ability to learn statistical models with high interpretability. Current methods for learning statistical models either produce models that are not interpretable or have prohibitive computational costs when applied to massive data. In this paper we address this need by presenting a scalable algorithm for partial least squares regression (PLS), which we call compression-based PLS (cPLS), to learn predictive linear models with a high interpretability from massive high-dimensional data. We propose a novel grammar-compressed representation of data matrices that supports fast row and column access while the data matrix is in a compressed form. The original data matrix is grammar-compressed and then the linear model in PLS is learned on the compressed data matrix, which results in a significant reduction in working space, greatly improving scalability. We experimentally test cPLS on its ability to learn linear models for classification, regression and feature extraction with various massive high-dimensional data, and show that cPLS performs superiorly in terms of prediction accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability., Comment: To be appeared in the Proceedings of KDD'16

The suffix array, perhaps the most important data structure in modern string processing, is often augmented with the longest common prefix (LCP) array which stores the lengths of the LCPs for lexicographically adjacent suffixes of a string. Together the two arrays are roughly equivalent to the suffix tree with the LCP array representing the tree shape. In order to better understand the combinatorics of LCP arrays, we consider the problem of inferring a string from an LCP array, i.e., determining whether a given array of integers is a valid LCP array, and if it is, reconstructing some string or all strings with that LCP array. There are recent studies of inferring a string from a suffix tree shape but using significantly more information (in the form of suffix links) than is available in the LCP array. We provide two main results. (1) We describe two algorithms for inferring strings from an LCP array when we allow a generalized form of LCP array defined for a multiset of cyclic strings: a linear time algorithm for binary alphabet and a general algorithm with polynomial time complexity for a constant alphabet size. (2) We prove that determining whether a given integer array is a valid LCP array is NP-complete when we require more restricted forms of LCP array defined for a single cyclic or non-cyclic string or a multiset of non-cyclic strings. The result holds whether or not the alphabet is restricted to be binary. In combination, the two results show that the generalized form of LCP array for a multiset of cyclic strings is fundamentally different from the other more restricted forms., Comment: Added algorithm for general alphabets

Most of the fastest-growing string collections today are repetitive, that is, most of the constituent documents are similar to many others. As these collections keep growing, a key approach to handling them is to exploit their repetitiveness, which can reduce their space usage by orders of magnitude. We study the problem of indexing repetitive string collections in order to perform efficient document retrieval operations on them. Document retrieval problems are routinely solved by search engines on large natural language collections, but the techniques are less developed on generic string collections. The case of repetitive string collections is even less understood, and there are very few existing solutions. We develop two novel ideas, {\em interleaved LCPs} and {\em precomputed document lists}, that yield highly compressed indexes solving the problem of document listing (find all the documents where a string appears), top-$k$ document retrieval (find the $k$ documents where a string appears most often), and document counting (count the number of documents where a string appears). We also show that a classical data structure supporting the latter query becomes highly compressible on repetitive data. Finally, we show how the tools we developed can be combined to solve ranked conjunctive and disjunctive multi-term queries under the simple tf-idf model of relevance. We thoroughly evaluate the resulting techniques in various real-life repetitiveness scenarios, and recommend the best choices for each case., 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. 690941. Accepted to the Information Retrieval Journal

Relative Lempel-Ziv (RLZ) is a popular algorithm for compressing databases of genomes from individuals of the same species when fast random access is desired. With Kuruppu et al.'s (SPIRE 2010) original implementation, a reference genome is selected and then the other genomes are greedily parsed into phrases exactly matching substrings of the reference. Deorowicz and Grabowski (Bioinformatics, 2011) pointed out that letting each phrase end with a mismatch character usually gives better compression because many of the differences between individuals' genomes are single-nucleotide substitutions. Ferrada et al. (SPIRE 2014) then pointed out that also using relative pointers and run-length compressing them usually gives even better compression. In this paper we generalize Ferrada et al.'s idea to handle well also short insertions, deletions and multi-character substitutions. We show experimentally that our generalization achieves better compression than Ferrada et al.'s implementation with comparable random-access times.

Simple and fast decoding is one of the main advantages of LZ77-type text encoding used in many popular file compressors such as gzip and 7zip. With the recent introduction of external memory algorithms for Lempel-Ziv factorization there is a need for external memory LZ77 decoding but the standard algorithm makes random accesses to the text and cannot be trivially modified for external memory computation. We describe the first external memory algorithms for LZ77 decoding, prove that their I/O complexity is optimal, and demonstrate that they are very fast in practice, only about three times slower than in-memory decoding (when reading input and writing output is included in the time).

Given a string $S$ of $n$ symbols, a longest common extension query $\mathsf{LCE}(i,j)$ asks for the length of the longest common prefix of the $i$th and $j$th suffixes of $S$. LCE queries have several important applications in string processing, perhaps most notably to suffix sorting. Recently, Bille et al. (J. Discrete Algorithms 25:42-50, 2014, Proc. CPM 2015: 65-76) described several data structures for answering LCE queries that offers a space-time trade-off between data structure size and query time. In particular, for a parameter $1 \leq \tau \leq n$, their best deterministic solution is a data structure of size $O(n/\tau)$ which allows LCE queries to be answered in $O(\tau)$ time. However, the construction time for all deterministic versions of their data structure is quadratic in $n$. In this paper, we propose a deterministic solution that achieves a similar space-time trade-off of $O(\tau\min\{\log\tau,\log\frac{n}{\tau}\})$ query time using $O(n/\tau)$ space, but significantly improve the construction time to $O(n\tau)$., Comment: updated title

Suffix trees are one of the most versatile data structures in stringology, with many applications in bioinformatics. Their main drawback is their size, which can be tens of times larger than the input sequence. Much effort has been put into reducing the space usage, leading ultimately to compressed suffix trees. These compressed data structures can efficiently simulate the suffix tree, while using space proportional to a compressed representation of the sequence. In this work, we take a new approach to compressed suffix trees for repetitive sequence collections, such as collections of individual genomes. We compress the suffix trees of individual sequences relative to the suffix tree of a reference sequence. These relative data structures provide competitive time/space trade-offs, being almost as small as the smallest compressed suffix trees for repetitive collections, and competitive in time with the largest and fastest compressed suffix trees., Comment: Accepted to The Computer Journal. The implementation is available at https://github.com/jltsiren/relative-fm

The Lempel-Ziv parsing of a string (LZ77 for short) is one of the most important and widely-used algorithmic tools in data compression and string processing. We show that the Lempel-Ziv parsing of a string of length $n$ on an alphabet of size $\sigma$ can be computed in $O(n\log\log\sigma)$ time ($O(n)$ time if we allow randomization) using $O(n\log\sigma)$ bits of working space; that is, using space proportional to that of the input string in bits. The previous fastest algorithm using $O(n\log\sigma)$ space takes $O(n(\log\sigma+\log\log n))$ time. We also consider the important rightmost variant of the problem, where the goal is to associate with each phrase of the parsing its most recent occurrence in the input string. We solve this problem in $O(n(1 + (\log\sigma/\sqrt{\log n}))$ time, using the same working space as above. The previous best solution for rightmost parsing uses $O(n(1+\log\sigma/\log\log n))$ time and $O(n\log n)$ space. As a bonus, in our solution for rightmost parsing we provide a faster construction method for efficient 2D orthogonal range reporting, which is of independent interest., Comment: 25 pages

We prove that it is NP-complete to decide whether a given string can be factored into palindromes that are each unique in the factorization.

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.

We describe a data structure that stores a string $S$ in space similar to that of its Lempel-Ziv encoding and efficiently supports access, rank and select queries. These queries are fundamental for implementing succinct and compressed data structures, such as compressed trees and graphs. We show that our data structure can be built in a scalable manner and is both small and fast in practice compared to other data structures supporting such queries.

A crucial problem in genome assembly is the discovery and correction of misassembly errors in draft genomes. We develop a method that will enhance the quality of draft genomes by identifying and removing misassembly errors using paired short read sequence data and optical mapping data. We apply our method to various assemblies of the loblolly pine and Francisella tularensis genomes. Our results demonstrate that we detect more than 54% of extensively misassembled contigs and more than 60% of locally misassembed contigs in an assembly of Francisella tularensis, and between 31% and 100% of extensively misassembled contigs and between 57% and 73% of locally misassembed contigs in the assemblies of loblolly pine. MISSEQUEL can be downloaded at http://www.cs.colostate.edu/seq/., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to RECOMB. Preparing to submit to Genome Biology

The de Bruijn graph $G_K$ of a set of strings $S$ is a key data structure in genome assembly that represents overlaps between all the $K$-length substrings of $S$. Construction and navigation of the graph is a space and time bottleneck in practice and the main hurdle for assembling large, eukaryote genomes. This problem is compounded by the fact that state-of-the-art assemblers do not build the de Bruijn graph for a single order (value of $K$) but for multiple values of $K$. More precisely, they build $d$ de Bruijn graphs, each with a specific order, i.e., $G_{K_1}, G_{K_2}, ..., G_{K_d}$. Although, this paradigm increases the quality of the assembly produced, it increases the memory by a factor of $d$ in most cases. In this paper, we show how to augment a succinct de Bruijn graph representation by Bowe et al. (Proc. WABI, 2012) to support new operations that let us change order on the fly, effectively representing all de Bruijn graphs of order up to some maximum $K$ in a single data structure. Our experiments show our variable-order de Bruijn graph only modestly increases space usage, construction time, and navigation time compared to a single order graph., Comment: Conference submission, 10 pages, +minor corrections

We address the problem of counting the number of strings in a collection where a given pattern appears, which has applications in information retrieval and data mining. Existing solutions are in a theoretical stage. We implement these solutions and develop some new variants, comparing them experimentally on various datasets. Our results not only show which are the best options for each situation and help discard practically unappealing solutions, but also uncover some unexpected compressibility properties of the best data structures. By taking advantage of these properties, we can reduce the size of the structures by a factor of 5--400, depending on the dataset., Comment: This is a slightly extended version of the paper that was presented at DCC 2015. The implementations are available at http://jltsiren.kapsi.fi/rlcsa and https://github.com/ahartik/succinct

Given a string $S$ of length $N$ on a fixed alphabet of $\sigma$ symbols, a grammar compressor produces a context-free grammar $G$ of size $n$ that generates $S$ and only $S$. In this paper we describe data structures to support the following operations on a grammar-compressed string: $\mbox{rank}_c(S,i)$ (return the number of occurrences of symbol $c$ before position $i$ in $S$); $\mbox{select}_c(S,i)$ (return the position of the $i$th occurrence of $c$ in $S$); and $\mbox{access}(S,i,j)$ (return substring $S[i,j]$). For rank and select we describe data structures of size $O(n\sigma\log N)$ bits that support the two operations in $O(\log N)$ time. We propose another structure that uses $O(n\sigma\log (N/n)(\log N)^{1+\epsilon})$ bits and that supports the two queries in $O(\log N/\log\log N)$, where $\epsilon>0$ is an arbitrary constant. To our knowledge, we are the first to study the asymptotic complexity of rank and select in the grammar-compressed setting, and we provide a hardness result showing that significantly improving the bounds we achieve would imply a major breakthrough on a hard graph-theoretical problem. Our main result for access is a method that requires $O(n\log N)$ bits of space and $O(\log N+m/\log_\sigma N)$ time to extract $m=j-i+1$ consecutive symbols from $S$. Alternatively, we can achieve $O(\log N/\log\log N+m/\log_\sigma N)$ query time using $O(n\log (N/n)(\log N)^{1+\epsilon})$ bits of space. This matches a lower bound stated by Verbin and Yu for strings where $N$ is polynomially related to $n$., Comment: 16 pages

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/

With current hardware and software, a standard computer can now hold in RAM an index for approximate pattern matching on about half a dozen human genomes. Sequencing technologies have improved so quickly, however, that scientists will soon demand indexes for thousands of genomes. Whereas most researchers who have addressed this problem have proposed completely new kinds of indexes, we recently described a simple technique that scales standard indexes to work on more genomes. Our main idea was to filter the dataset with LZ77, build a standard index for the filtered file, and then create a hybrid of that standard index and an LZ77-based index. In this paper we describe how to our technique to use alignments instead of LZ77, in order to simplify and speed up both preprocessing and random access.

For decades, computing the LZ factorization (or LZ77 parsing) of a string has been a requisite and computationally intensive step in many diverse applications, including text indexing and data compression. Many algorithms for LZ77 parsing have been discovered over the years; however, despite the increasing need to apply LZ77 to massive data sets, no algorithm to date scales to inputs that exceed the size of internal memory. In this paper we describe the first algorithm for computing the LZ77 parsing in external memory. Our algorithm is fast in practice and will allow the next generation of text indexes to be realised for massive strings and string collections., Comment: 10 pages

We introduce a new string matching problem called order-preserving matching on numeric strings where a pattern matches a text if the text contains a substring whose relative orders coincide with those of the pattern. Order-preserving matching is applicable to many scenarios such as stock price analysis and musical melody matching in which the order relations should be matched instead of the strings themselves. Solving order-preserving matching has to do with representations of order relations of a numeric string. We define prefix representation and nearest neighbor representation, which lead to efficient algorithms for order-preserving matching. We present efficient algorithms for single and multiple pattern cases. For the single pattern case, we give an O(n log m) time algorithm and optimize it further to obtain O(n + m log m) time. For the multiple pattern case, we give an O(n log m) time algorithm., Comment: 15 pages; submitted to Theoretical Computer Science, 5 Dec 2012; presented at Theo Murphy International Scientific Meeting of the Royal Society on Storage and Indexing of Massive Data, 7 Feb 2013

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 pages