Practical rank/select queries over arbitrary sequences

Abstract

We present a practical study on the compact representation of sequences supporting rank, select, and access queries. While there are several theoretical solutions to the problem, only a few have been tried out, and there is little idea on how the others would perform, especially in the case of sequences with very large alphabets. We first present a new practical implementation of the compressed representation for bit sequences proposed by Raman, Raman, and Rao [SODA 2002], that is competitive with the existing ones when the sequences are not too compressible. It also has nice local compression properties, and we show that this makes it an excellent tool for compressed text indexing in combination with the Burrows-Wheeler transform. This shows the practicality of a recent theoretical proposal [Mäkinen and Navarro, SPIRE 2007], achieving spaces never seen before. Second, for general sequences, we tune wavelet trees for the case of very large alphabets, by removing their pointer information. We show that this gives an excellent solution for representing a sequence within zero-order entropy space, in cases where the large alphabet poses a serious challenge to typical encoding methods. We also present the first implementation of Golynski et al.'s representation [SODA 2006], which offers another interesting time/space trade-off. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.