MRCSI: Compressing and Searching String Collections with Multiple References

Efficiently storing and searching collections of similar strings, such as large populations of genomes or long change histories of documents from Wikis, is a timely and challenging problem. Several recent proposals could drastically reduce space requirements by exploiting the similarity between strings in so-called reference-based compression. However, these indexes are usually not searchable any more, i.e., in these methods search efficiency is sacrificed for storage efficiency. We propose Multi-Reference Compressed Search Indexes (MRCSI) as a framework for efficiently compressing dissimilar string collections. In contrast to previous works which can use only a single reference for compression, MRCSI (a) uses multiple references for achieving increased compression rates, where the reference set need not be specified by the user but is determined automatically, and (b) supports efficient approximate string searching with edit distance constraints. We prove that finding the smallest MRCSI is NP-hard. We then propose three heuristics for computing MRCSIs achieving increasing compression ratios. Compared to state-of-the-art competitors, our methods target an interesting and novel sweet-spot between high compression ratio versus search efficiency.