Run-Length Compressed Indexes for Repetitive Sequence Collections

A repetitive sequence collection is one where portions of a base sequence of length n are repeated many times with small variations, forming a collection of total length N . Examples of such collections are version control data and genome sequences of individuals, where the differences can be expressed by lists of basic edit operations. Flexible and efficient data analysis on a such typically huge collection is plausible using suffix trees. However, suffix tree occupies O(N logN) bits, which very soon inhibits in-memory analyses. Recent advances in full-text indexing reduce the space of suffix tree to NHk + o(N log σ) bits at the cost of running times of its operations increasing by polylog(N) factor. Here Hk is the k-th order entropy of the collection and σ is the alphabet size. Notice that for r identical copies of an incompressible base sequence, the bound simplifies to N log σ(1 + o(1)) bits. We develop new static/dynamic full-text self-indexes based on the run-length encoding whose space-requirements are much less dependent on N . For example, we obtain an index occupying R log σ(1+o(1))+R log NR (1+o(1))+r log n+O((s+r) log(s+r)) bits, where s is the total number of basic edit operations to convert the r repeats into substrings of the base sequence, and R ≤ min(n, nHk)+O((s+ r) logσ N), where the O() term holds in the expected case. The new indexes can be plugged into a recent dynamic fully-compressed suffix tree using an additional O((N/δ) logN) bits of space for any δ = polylog(N), and retaining the polylog(N) time slowdown on operations. Computing Reviews (1998)