Succinct Indexes

Abstract

This thesis defines and designs succinct indexes for several abstract data types (ADTs). The concept is to design auxiliary data structures that ideally occupy asymptotically less space than the information-theoretic lower bound on the space required to encode the given data, and support an extended set of operations using the basic operators defined in the ADT. As opposed to succinct (integrated data/index) encodings, the main advantage of succinct indexes is that we make assumptions only on the ADT through which the main data is accessed, rather than the way in which the data is encoded. This allows more freedom in the encoding of the main data. In this thesis, we present succinct indexes for various data types, namely strings, binary relations, multi-labeled trees and multi-labeled graphs, as well as succinct text indexes. For strings, binary relations and multi-labeled trees, when the operators in the ADTs are supported in constant time, our results are comparable to previous results, while allowing more flexibility in the encoding of the given data.

Using our techniques, we improve several previous results. We design succinct representations for strings and binary relations that are more compact than previous results, while supporting access/rank/select operations efficiently. Our high-order entropy compressed text index provides more efficient support for searches than previous results that occupy essentially the same amount of space. Our succinct representation for labeled trees supports more operations than previous results do. We also design the first succinct representations of labeled graphs.

To design succinct indexes, we also have some preliminary results on succinct data structure design. We present a theorem that characterizes a permutation as a suffix array, based on which we design succinct text indexes. We design a succinct representation of ordinal trees that supports all the navigational operations supported by various succinct tree representations. In addition, this representation also supports two other encodings schemes of ordinal trees as abstract data types. Finally, we design succinct representations of planar triangulations and planar graphs which support the rank/select of edges in counter clockwise order in addition to other operations supported in previous work, and a succinct representation of k-page graph which supports more efficient navigation than previous results for large values of k.