String search algorithms

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This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)

Intro

Keyword search

That is, we don't care about substrings / randomly positioned patterns.



Exact-substring search

You'll variably care more about some of about

  • search time
  • preprocessing time
  • memory use


In the below:

  • m is the pattern length
  • n is the text length
  • σ is the alphabet size


Naive / brute force

Try matching the string at each possible position.

Summary:

  • No preprocessing
  • Constant extra space (very little)
  • For a needle of length n in haystack of size m, all occurences takes O(m*n)


FSA (matcher)

Build a deterministic finite state automaton (a.k.a. DFA) to recognize a specific pattern/string.

At initial cost of building it, you can get matching that is linear time with the haystack length.

Useful when the matching needs to be done repeatedly, the the pattern does not change and the data may.


Suffix trees

Suffix trees are basically a sort of indexing of a fixed haystack.


It allow substring searches to be executed in O(l+r) average-case (query length l, result length r).

It however requires memory use of O(n log n) average (O(n^2) worst), and O(n) build time.


Suffix trees are a slight misnomer - what you index are substrings, while only the process of building involves suffixes directly.

http://mila.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/suffix_tree/

Burrows-Wheeler Transform

This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)

The Burrows-Wheeler transform is itself a reordering string transform, only.


It happens to be reversible (which, looking at its input and output, seems a little magical).

The BWT is related to the suffix array (/ suffix-tree) line of thought, and one way to calculate (and explain) the BWT is via suffix arrays.


Because it happens to often put similar patterns near each other, this is interesting for compression (and e.g. bzip2 is built around BWT). The reversibility makes it easier/possible to use it.


The BWT used as an index supports questions like "how much does this arbitrary substring appear in the text" without searching all the data, so in O(1) (well, O(length_of_pattern)). (verify)

The hits themselves can only be retrieved by interpreting the data, in O(n) (verify)

See also terms like LF Mapping, FM Index



See also:


Boyer-moore and variants

Where a naive substring search would try to look for a pattern at each successive index, BM does pre-analysis of the pattern so that when it doesn't natch, it knows how far ahead it can skip.

This usually saves a bunch of work when

the pattern is long and/or non-repetitive,such as natural text.
...and, due to needing pre-analysis, when you will be using this pattern repeatedly or in a large haystack.


See also:

Knuth-Morris-Pratt

Pre-analysis that also considers skips when matches fail, but more specifically considers avoiding partial re-matches (by matching right-to-left).

Which helps for simple-alphabet and/or repetitive patterns, e.g. DNA sequences, where it can do better than at least the most classical Boyer-Moore.

See also:

Z-Algorithm

Multiple-substring

That is, match on multiple patterns at the same time.

Aho-Corasick

Does pre-analysis of multiple search patterns to be searched for at once.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho%E2%80%93Corasick_algorithm


Rabin-Karp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabin%E2%80%93Karp_string_search_algorithm==

Aho–Corasick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho%E2%80%93Corasick_algorithm

Commentz-Walter

http://www.google.com/search?q=Commentz-Walter

Approximate-substring

Bitap / Baeza-Yates–Gonnet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitap_algorithm

Tree and graph searches

While trees are often introduced as an entirely abstract data structure, a lot of trees have rather specific properties for specific needs.

For example, self-balancing trees avoid becoming overly expensive with a lot of updates.


Some tree-search algorithms explore general tree properties, and some are tightly bound to the properties of a specific tree. As such, this section involves as much data structures as search algorithms.



Binary search tree

Heaps (and queues)

A heap is a tree that satisfies the heap property, basically that a node has a value with is larger-than-or-equal (or less-than-or-equal, depending on purpose) than its parent's.

In other words, it's a tree with orderedness as part of its nature, though exactly how varies.


Due to that nature, they are also often the implementation behind the concept of a (priority) queue, (often to make inserts and removals cost low/constant) and there are some heap implementations specifically for queues.


For a general comparison, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_(data_structure)



Binary heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_heap

Binomial heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_heap

Fibonacci heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_heap


Leftist heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leftist_tree


Pairing heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairing_heap


Skew heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skew_heap


Van Emde Boas tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Emde_Boas_tree


2-3 heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2%E2%80%933_heap

B-heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-heap

d-ary heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-ary_heap

weak heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_heap

Treap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treap


(Randomized) Meldable heap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_meldable_heap

Radix heap / Monotone priority queue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_priority_queue

Brodal queue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodal_queue

Tries

Suffix tree

(See also BWT; they are in part a logical extension of the suffix tree idea)

Radix tree

Hash tree

Ternary search tree

Y-fast trie

Search concepts

Branch and bound

A* search

Visit possibilities according to their (heuristically determined) promise, best to worst.

Beam search

Like A*, but only checks the most promising paths, not all.


VPsb-tree

Different from SB-tree.


SB-tree

Variant of B-tree that is good at sequential fetches.

Different from VPsb-tree.


http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.55.9482&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Top tree

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_tree

LC-RS tree

Balancing trees

T-tree

Unsorted tree stuff

LLRB tree

AA tree

AVL tree

Scapegoat tree

Splay tree

Bx-tree

UB-tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UB-tree

(a,b)-tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(a,b)-tree

Dancing tree

Similar to B+ trees, but only rebalance on request.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_tree

HTree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTree


B-trees and its friends

B-tree

B+ tree

B*-tree

Specific-purpose trees

Serves only a rather specific need.


MVP tree

(Multi Vantage Point)

Meant for metric-space data.

Allows looking for hits close to a query, according to that metric, so e.g. useful for 'nearby location' sort of things.

Based on a VP tree (which is more clearly just a type of BSP tree), adding storage of distances, and adding multiple vantage points to partition the space at each level (which is computationally expensive, so makes more sense for index-once-lookup-many cases than for rebalancing ones(verify)).

Tends to outperform M-trees?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVP_Tree

https://code.google.com/p/mvptree-library/ (C implementation)

https://github.com/trolldbois/phash-graph-mvp/blob/master/mvptree.py (Python implementation)


M-tree

For metric-space data, otherwise similar to R-trees, B-trees.


M+-tree

For metric-space data. Tries to mix the good parts of M-trees and MVP-trees(verify)



BSP tree

Quadtree

Octree

k-d tree

Implicit k-d tree

VP tree

Vantage Point trees

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=130


Merkle tree

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

Unsorted


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