Computing the longest common prefix array based on the burrows-wheeler transform

Abstract

Many sequence analysis tasks can be accomplished with a suffix array, and several of them additionally need the longest common prefix array. In large scale applications, suffix arrays are being replaced with full-text indexes that are based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform. In this paper, we present the first algorithm that computes the longest common prefix array directly on the wavelet tree of the Burrows-Wheeler transformed string. It runs in linear time and a practical implementation requires approximately 2.2 bytes per character. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.