Linear Time Lempel-Ziv Factorization: Simple, Fast, Small

TL;DR

This paper introduces new linear time algorithms for LZ factorization that are highly space-efficient, practical, simple to implement, and outperform previous methods in both speed and memory usage.

Contribution

The paper presents the most space-efficient linear time algorithms for LZ factorization, requiring only 2n log n + O(log n) bits of space, improving over prior methods.

Findings

Algorithms run in linear time

Require significantly less space than previous methods

Practical and easy to implement

Abstract

Computing the LZ factorization (or LZ77 parsing) of a string is a computational bottleneck in many diverse applications, including data compression, text indexing, and pattern discovery. We describe new linear time LZ factorization algorithms, some of which require only 2n log n + O(log n) bits of working space to factorize a string of length n. These are the most space efficient linear time algorithms to date, using n log n bits less space than any previous linear time algorithm. The algorithms are also practical, simple to implement, and very fast in practice.