Given a text T[1,n] over an alphabet Σ of size σ, the suffix array of T stores the lexicographic order of the suffixes of T. The suffix array needs Θ(nlog n) bits of space compared to the n log σ bits needed to store T itself. A major breakthrough [FM - Index, FOCS'00] in the last two decades has been encoding the suffix array in near-optimal number of bits (≈ log σ bits per character). One can decode a suffix array value using the FM-Index in log^{O(1)} n time. We study an extension of the problem in which we have to also decode the suffix array values of the reverse text. This problem has numerous applications such as in approximate pattern matching [Lam et al., BIBM' 09]. Known approaches maintain the FM - Index of both the forward and the reverse text which drives up the space occupancy to 2nlog σ bits (plus lower order terms). This brings in the natural question of whether we can decode the suffix array values of both the forward and the reverse text, but by using nlog σ bits (plus lower order terms). We answer this question positively, and show that given the FM - Index of the forward text, we can decode the suffix array value of the reverse text in near logarithmic average time. Additionally, our experimental results are competitive when compared to the standard approach of maintaining the FM - Index for both the forward and the reverse text. We believe that applications that require both the forward and reverse text will benefit from our approach.

Abstract Background Alignment-free methods for sequence comparisons have become popular in many bioinformatics applications, specifically in the estimation of sequence similarity measures to construct phylogenetic trees. Recently, the average common substring measure, ACS, and its k-mismatch counterpart, ACSk, have been shown to produce results as effective as multiple-sequence alignment based methods for reconstruction of phylogeny trees. Since computing ACSk takes O(n logkn) time and hence impractical for large datasets, multiple heuristics that can approximate ACSk have been introduced. Results In this paper, we present a novel linear-time heuristic to approximate ACSk, which is faster than computing the exact ACSk while being closer to the exact ACSk values compared to previously published linear-time greedy heuristics. Using four real datasets, containing both DNA and protein sequences, we evaluate our algorithm in terms of accuracy, runtime and demonstrate its applicability for phylogeny reconstruction. Our algorithm provides better accuracy than previously published heuristic methods, while being comparable in its applications to phylogeny reconstruction. Conclusions Our method produces a better approximation for ACSk and is applicable for the alignment-free comparison of biological sequences at highly competitive speed. The algorithm is implemented in Rust programming language and the source code is available at https://github.com/srirampc/adyar-rs .

We revisit the heaviest induced ancestors problem, which has several interesting applications in string matching. Let T_1 and T_2 be two weighted trees, where the weight W(u) of a node u in either of the two trees is more than the weight of u's parent. Additionally, the leaves in both trees are labeled and the labeling of the leaves in T_2 is a permutation of those in T_1. A node x in T_1 and a node y in T_2 are induced, iff their subtree have at least one common leaf label. A heaviest induced ancestor query HIA(u_1,u_2) is: given a node u_1 in T_1 and a node u_2 in T_2, output the pair (u_1^*,u_2^*) of induced nodes with the highest combined weight W(u^*_1) + W(u^*_2), such that u_1^* is an ancestor of u_1 and u^*_2 is an ancestor of u_2. Let n be the number of nodes in both trees combined and epsilon >0 be an arbitrarily small constant. Gagie et al. [CCCG' 13] introduced this problem and proposed three solutions with the following space-time trade-offs: - an O(n log^2n)-word data structure with O(log n log log n) query time - an O(n log n)-word data structure with O(log^2 n) query time - an O(n)-word data structure with O(log^{3+epsilon}n) query time. In this paper, we revisit this problem and present new data structures, with improved bounds. Our results are as follows. - an O(n log n)-word data structure with O(log n log log n) query time - an O(n)-word data structure with O(log^2 n/log log n) query time. As a corollary, we also improve the LZ compressed index of Gagie et al. [CCCG' 13] for answering longest common substring (LCS) queries. Additionally, we show that the LCS after one edit problem of size n [Amir et al., SPIRE' 17] can also be reduced to the heaviest induced ancestors problem over two trees of n nodes in total. This yields a straightforward improvement over its current solution of O(n log^3 n) space and O(log^3 n) query time.

The non-overlapping indexing problem is defined as follows: pre-process a given text T[1,n] of length n into a data structure such that whenever a pattern P[1,p] comes as an input, we can efficiently report the largest set of non-overlapping occurrences of P in T. The best known solution is by Cohen and Porat [ISAAC, 2009]. Their index size is O(n) words and query time is optimal O(p+nocc), where nocc is the output size. We study this problem in the cache-oblivious model and present a new data structure of size O(n log n) words. It can answer queries in optimal O(p/(B)+log_B n+nocc/B) I/Os, where B is the block size.

The Average Common Substring (ACS) is a popular alignment-free distance measure for phylogeny reconstruction. The ACS of a sequence X[1, x] w.r.t. another sequence Y[1, y] is ACS(X, Y) = 1x∑i=1xmaxjlcp(X[i, x], Y[j, y]) The lcp(·, ·) of two input sequences is the length of their longest common p refix. The ACS can be computed in O(n) space and time, where n = x + y is the input size. The compressed string matching is the study of string matching problems with the following twist: the input data is in a compressed format and the underling task must be performed with little or no decompression. In this paper, we revisit the ACS problem under this paradigm where the input sequences are given in their run-length encoded format. We present an algorithm to compute ACS(X, Y) in O(N logN) time using O(N) space, where N is the total length of sequences after run-length encoding.