Implicit Compression Boosting with Applications to Self-indexing

Compression boosting (Ferragina & Manzini, SODA 2004) is a new technique to enhance zeroth order entropy compressors’ performance to k-th order entropy. It works by constructing the BurrowsWheeler transform of the input text, finding optimal partitioning of the transform, and then compressing each piece using an arbitrary zeroth order compressor. The optimal partitioning has the property that the achieved compression is boosted to k-th order entropy, for any k. The technique has an application to text indexing: Essentially, building a wavelet tree (Grossi et al., SODA 2003) for each piece in the partitioning yields a k-th order compressed full-text self-index providing efficient substring searches on the indexed text (Ferragina et al., SPIRE 2004). In this paper, we show that using explicit compression boosting with wavelet trees is not necessary; our new analysis reveals that the size of the wavelet tree built for the complete Burrows-Wheeler transformed text is, in essence, the sum of those built for the pieces in the optimal partitioning. Hence, the technique provides a way to do compression boosting implicitly, with a trivial linear time algorithm, but fixed to a specific zeroth order compressor (Raman et al., SODA 2002). In addition to having these consequences on compression and static full-text self-indexes, the analysis shows that a recent dynamic zeroth order compressed self-index (Mäkinen & Navarro, CPM 2006) occupies in fact space proportional to k-th order entropy.