Time-Space Trade-Offs for Lempel-Ziv Compressed Indexing

Abstract

Given a string S, the compressed indexing problem is to preprocess S into a compressed representation that supports fast substring queries. The goal is to use little space relative to the compressed size of S while supporting fast queries. We present a compressed index based on the Lempel-Ziv 1977 compression scheme. Let n, and z denote the size of the input string, and the compressed LZ77 string, respectively. We obtain the following time-space trade-offs. Given a pattern string P of length m, we can solve the problem in

(i) O(m + occ lglg n) time using O(z lg(n/z) lglg z) space, or
(ii) O(m(1 + lg^e z / lg(n/z)) + occ(lglg n + lg^e z)) time using O(z lg(n/z)) space, for any 0 < e < 1

In particular, (i) improves the leading term in the query time of the previous best solution from O(m lg m) to O(m) at the cost of increasing the space by a factor lglg z. Alternatively, (ii) matches the previous best space bound, but has a leading term in the query time of O(m(1+lg^e z / lg(n/z))). However, for any polynomial compression ratio, i.e., z = O(n^{1-d}), for constant d > 0, this becomes O(m). Our index also supports extraction of any substring of length l in O(l + lg(n/z)) time. Technically, our results are obtained by novel extensions and combinations of existing data structures of independent interest, including a new batched variant of weak prefix search.