A New Class of Searchable and Provably Highly Compressible String Transformations

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform is a string transformation that plays a fundamental role for the design of self-indexing compressed data structures. Over the years, researchers have successfully extended this transformation outside the domains of strings. However, efforts to find non-trivial alternatives of the original, now 25 years old, Burrows-Wheeler string transformation have met limited success. In this paper we bring new lymph to this area by introducing a whole new family of transformations that have all the "myriad virtues" of the BWT: they can be computed and inverted in linear time, they produce provably highly compressible strings, and they support linear time pattern search direc…