String synchronizing sets: sublinear-time BWT construction and optimal LCE data structure
Dominik Kempa, Tomasz Kociumaka · 2019
Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT) is an invertible text transformation that, given a text T of length n, permutes its symbols according to the lexicographic order of suffixes of T. BWT is one of the most heavily studied algorithms in data compression with numerous applications in indexing, sequence analysis, and bioinformatics. Its construction is a bottleneck in many scenarios, and settling the complexity of this task is one of the most important unsolved problems in sequence analysis that has remained open for 25 years. Given a binary string of length n, occupying O(n/logn) machine words, the BWT construction algorithm due to Hon et al. (SIAM J. Comput., 2009) runs in O(n) time and O(n/logn) space. Recent advancements (Belazzougui, STOC 2014, and Munro et al., SODA 2017) focus on removing the alphabet-size dependency in the time complexity, but they still require Ω(n) time. Despite the clearly suboptimal running time, the existing techniques appear to have reached their limits.