Sublinear Algorithms for Approximating String Compressibility

We raise the question of approximating the compressibility of a string with respect to a fixed compression scheme, in sublinear time. We study this question in detail for two popular lossless compression schemes: run-length encoding (RLE) and a variant of Lempel-Ziv (LZ77), and present sublinear alg...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Raskhodnikova, Sofya, Ron, Dana, Rubinfeld, Ronitt, Smith, Adam
Otros Autores: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Formato: Artículo
Lenguaje:en_US
Publicado: Springer-Verlag 2012
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/73520
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4353-7639
Descripción
Sumario:We raise the question of approximating the compressibility of a string with respect to a fixed compression scheme, in sublinear time. We study this question in detail for two popular lossless compression schemes: run-length encoding (RLE) and a variant of Lempel-Ziv (LZ77), and present sublinear algorithms for approximating compressibility with respect to both schemes. We also give several lower bounds that show that our algorithms for both schemes cannot be improved significantly. Our investigation of LZ77 yields results whose interest goes beyond the initial questions we set out to study. In particular, we prove combinatorial structural lemmas that relate the compressibility of a string with respect to LZ77 to the number of distinct short substrings contained in it (its ℓth subword complexity , for small ℓ). In addition, we show that approximating the compressibility with respect to LZ77 is related to approximating the support size of a distribution.