Sensitivity of Repetitiveness Measures to String Reversal

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bannai, Hideo, Fujie, Yuto, Guo, Peaker, Inenaga, Shunsuke, Nakashima, Yuto, Puglisi, Simon J., Urbina, Cristian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Bannai, Hideo
Fujie, Yuto
Guo, Peaker
Inenaga, Shunsuke
Nakashima, Yuto
Puglisi, Simon J.
Urbina, Cristian
author_facet Bannai, Hideo
Fujie, Yuto
Guo, Peaker
Inenaga, Shunsuke
Nakashima, Yuto
Puglisi, Simon J.
Urbina, Cristian
contents We study the impact that string reversal can have on several repetitiveness measures. First, we exhibit an infinite family of strings where the number, $r$, of runs in the run-length encoding of the Burrows--Wheeler transform (BWT) can increase additively by $Θ(n)$ when reversing the string. This substantially improves the known $Ω(\log n)$ lower-bound for the additive sensitivity of $r$ and it is asymptotically tight. We generalize our result to other variants of the BWT, including the variant with an appended end-of-string symbol and the bijective BWT. We show that an analogous result holds for the size $z$ of the Lempel--Ziv 77 (LZ) parsing of the text, and also for some of its variants, including the non-overlapping LZ parsing, and the LZ-end parsing. Moreover, we describe a family of strings for which the ratio $z(w^R)/z(w)$ approaches $3$ from below as $|w|\rightarrow \infty$. We also show an asymptotically tight lower-bound of $Θ(n)$ for the additive sensitivity of the size $v$ of the smallest lexicographic parsing to string reversal. Finally, we show that the multiplicative sensitivity of $v$ to reversing the string is $Θ(\log n)$, and this lower-bound is also tight. Overall, our results expose the limitations of repetitiveness measures that are widely used in practice, against string reversal -- a simple and natural data transformation.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_14385
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sensitivity of Repetitiveness Measures to String Reversal
Bannai, Hideo
Fujie, Yuto
Guo, Peaker
Inenaga, Shunsuke
Nakashima, Yuto
Puglisi, Simon J.
Urbina, Cristian
Data Structures and Algorithms
We study the impact that string reversal can have on several repetitiveness measures. First, we exhibit an infinite family of strings where the number, $r$, of runs in the run-length encoding of the Burrows--Wheeler transform (BWT) can increase additively by $Θ(n)$ when reversing the string. This substantially improves the known $Ω(\log n)$ lower-bound for the additive sensitivity of $r$ and it is asymptotically tight. We generalize our result to other variants of the BWT, including the variant with an appended end-of-string symbol and the bijective BWT. We show that an analogous result holds for the size $z$ of the Lempel--Ziv 77 (LZ) parsing of the text, and also for some of its variants, including the non-overlapping LZ parsing, and the LZ-end parsing. Moreover, we describe a family of strings for which the ratio $z(w^R)/z(w)$ approaches $3$ from below as $|w|\rightarrow \infty$. We also show an asymptotically tight lower-bound of $Θ(n)$ for the additive sensitivity of the size $v$ of the smallest lexicographic parsing to string reversal. Finally, we show that the multiplicative sensitivity of $v$ to reversing the string is $Θ(\log n)$, and this lower-bound is also tight. Overall, our results expose the limitations of repetitiveness measures that are widely used in practice, against string reversal -- a simple and natural data transformation.
title Sensitivity of Repetitiveness Measures to String Reversal
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14385