New Entropy Measures for Tries with Applications to the XBWT

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Carfagna, Lorenzo, Tosoni, Carlo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915671399464960
author Carfagna, Lorenzo
Tosoni, Carlo
author_facet Carfagna, Lorenzo
Tosoni, Carlo
contents Entropy quantifies the number of bits required to store objects under certain given assumptions. While this is a well established concept for strings, in the context of tries the state-of-the-art regarding entropies is less developed. The standard trie worst-case entropy considers the set of tries with a fixed number of nodes and alphabet size. However, this approach does not consider the frequencies of the symbols in the trie, thus failing to capture the compressibility of tries with skewed character distributions. On the other hand, the label entropy [FOCS '05], proposed for node-labeled trees, does not take into account the tree topology, which has to be stored separately. In this paper, we introduce two new entropy measures for tries - worst-case and empirical - which overcome the two aforementioned limitations. Notably, our entropies satisfy similar properties of their string counterparts, thereby becoming very natural generalizations of the (simpler) string case. Indeed, our empirical entropy is closely related to the worst-case entropy and is reachable through a natural extension of arithmetic coding from strings to tries. Moreover we show that, similarly to the FM-index for strings [JACM '05], the XBWT of a trie can be compressed and efficiently indexed within our k-th order empirical entropy plus o(n) bits, with n being the number of nodes. Interestingly, the space usage of this encoding includes the trie topology and the upper-bound holds for every k sufficiently small, simultaneously. This XBWT encoding is always strictly smaller than the original one [JACM '09] and we show that in certain cases it is asymptotically smaller.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11618
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle New Entropy Measures for Tries with Applications to the XBWT
Carfagna, Lorenzo
Tosoni, Carlo
Data Structures and Algorithms
E.1; E.4; F.2.0
Entropy quantifies the number of bits required to store objects under certain given assumptions. While this is a well established concept for strings, in the context of tries the state-of-the-art regarding entropies is less developed. The standard trie worst-case entropy considers the set of tries with a fixed number of nodes and alphabet size. However, this approach does not consider the frequencies of the symbols in the trie, thus failing to capture the compressibility of tries with skewed character distributions. On the other hand, the label entropy [FOCS '05], proposed for node-labeled trees, does not take into account the tree topology, which has to be stored separately. In this paper, we introduce two new entropy measures for tries - worst-case and empirical - which overcome the two aforementioned limitations. Notably, our entropies satisfy similar properties of their string counterparts, thereby becoming very natural generalizations of the (simpler) string case. Indeed, our empirical entropy is closely related to the worst-case entropy and is reachable through a natural extension of arithmetic coding from strings to tries. Moreover we show that, similarly to the FM-index for strings [JACM '05], the XBWT of a trie can be compressed and efficiently indexed within our k-th order empirical entropy plus o(n) bits, with n being the number of nodes. Interestingly, the space usage of this encoding includes the trie topology and the upper-bound holds for every k sufficiently small, simultaneously. This XBWT encoding is always strictly smaller than the original one [JACM '09] and we show that in certain cases it is asymptotically smaller.
title New Entropy Measures for Tries with Applications to the XBWT
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
E.1; E.4; F.2.0
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11618