The Trie Measure, Revisited

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Alanko, Jarno N., Becker, Ruben, Cenzato, Davide, Gagie, Travis, Kim, Sung-Hwan, Kodric, Bojana, Prezza, Nicola
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Alanko, Jarno N.
Becker, Ruben
Cenzato, Davide
Gagie, Travis
Kim, Sung-Hwan
Kodric, Bojana
Prezza, Nicola
author_facet Alanko, Jarno N.
Becker, Ruben
Cenzato, Davide
Gagie, Travis
Kim, Sung-Hwan
Kodric, Bojana
Prezza, Nicola
contents In this paper, we study the following problem: given $n$ subsets $S_1, \dots, S_n$ of an integer universe $U = \{0,\dots, u-1\}$, having total cardinality $N = \sum_{i=1}^n |S_i|$, find a prefix-free encoding $enc : U \rightarrow \{0,1\}^+$ minimizing the so-called trie measure, i.e., the total number of edges in the $n$ binary tries $\mathcal T_1, \dots, \mathcal T_n$, where $\mathcal T_i$ is the trie packing the encoded integers $\{enc(x):x\in S_i\}$. We first observe that this problem is equivalent to that of merging $u$ sets with the cheapest sequence of binary unions, a problem which in [Ghosh et al., ICDCS 2015] is shown to be NP-hard. Motivated by the hardness of the general problem, we focus on particular families of prefix-free encodings. We start by studying the fixed-length shifted encoding of [Gupta et al., Theoretical Computer Science 2007]. Given a parameter $0\le a < u$, this encoding sends each $x \in U$ to $(x + a) \mod u$, interpreted as a bit-string of $\log u$ bits. We develop the first efficient algorithms that find the value of $a$ minimizing the trie measure when this encoding is used. Our two algorithms run in $O(u + N\log u)$ and $O(N\log^2 u)$ time, respectively. We proceed by studying ordered encodings (a.k.a. monotone or alphabetic), and describe an algorithm finding the optimal such encoding in $O(N+u^3)$ time. Within the same running time, we show how to compute the best shifted ordered encoding, provably no worse than both the optimal shifted and optimal ordered encodings. We provide implementations of our algorithms and discuss how these encodings perform in practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_10703
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Trie Measure, Revisited
Alanko, Jarno N.
Becker, Ruben
Cenzato, Davide
Gagie, Travis
Kim, Sung-Hwan
Kodric, Bojana
Prezza, Nicola
Data Structures and Algorithms
In this paper, we study the following problem: given $n$ subsets $S_1, \dots, S_n$ of an integer universe $U = \{0,\dots, u-1\}$, having total cardinality $N = \sum_{i=1}^n |S_i|$, find a prefix-free encoding $enc : U \rightarrow \{0,1\}^+$ minimizing the so-called trie measure, i.e., the total number of edges in the $n$ binary tries $\mathcal T_1, \dots, \mathcal T_n$, where $\mathcal T_i$ is the trie packing the encoded integers $\{enc(x):x\in S_i\}$. We first observe that this problem is equivalent to that of merging $u$ sets with the cheapest sequence of binary unions, a problem which in [Ghosh et al., ICDCS 2015] is shown to be NP-hard. Motivated by the hardness of the general problem, we focus on particular families of prefix-free encodings. We start by studying the fixed-length shifted encoding of [Gupta et al., Theoretical Computer Science 2007]. Given a parameter $0\le a < u$, this encoding sends each $x \in U$ to $(x + a) \mod u$, interpreted as a bit-string of $\log u$ bits. We develop the first efficient algorithms that find the value of $a$ minimizing the trie measure when this encoding is used. Our two algorithms run in $O(u + N\log u)$ and $O(N\log^2 u)$ time, respectively. We proceed by studying ordered encodings (a.k.a. monotone or alphabetic), and describe an algorithm finding the optimal such encoding in $O(N+u^3)$ time. Within the same running time, we show how to compute the best shifted ordered encoding, provably no worse than both the optimal shifted and optimal ordered encodings. We provide implementations of our algorithms and discuss how these encodings perform in practice.
title The Trie Measure, Revisited
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10703