Sensitivity of string compressors and repetitiveness measures

TL;DR

This paper investigates how small changes in input strings can cause large variations in compression sizes and repetitiveness measures, providing bounds that demonstrate robustness of certain algorithms.

Contribution

It establishes that common compression algorithms and repetitiveness measures have small constant worst-case sensitivity, contrasting with previously known large sensitivity results.

Findings

Lempel-Ziv 77 compressors have constant upper bounds on sensitivity.

GCIS grammar-based compressor also exhibits small constant sensitivity.

Repetitiveness measures like string attractor size and substring complexity are similarly robust.

Abstract

The sensitivity of a string compression algorithm $C$ asks how much the output size $C(T)$ for an input string $T$ can increase when a single character edit operation is performed on $T$. This notion enables one to measure the robustness of compression algorithms in terms of errors and/or dynamic changes occurring in the input string. In this paper, we analyze the worst-case multiplicative sensitivity of string compression algorithms, which is defined by $\max_{T \in \Sigma^n}\{C(T')/C(T) : ed(T, T') = 1\}$, where $ed(T, T')$ denotes the edit distance between $T$ and $T'$. For the most common versions of the Lempel-Ziv 77 compressors, we prove that the worst-case multiplicative sensitivity is upper bounded by a small constant, and give matching lower bounds. We generalize these results to the smallest bidirectional scheme $b$. In addition, we show that the sensitivity of a grammar-based compressor called GCIS is also a small constant. Further, we extend the notion of the worst-case sensitivity to string repetitiveness measures such as the smallest string attractor size $\gamma$ and the substring complexity $\delta$, and show that the worst-case sensitivity of $\delta$ is also a small constant. These results contrast with the previously known related results such that the size $z_{\rm 78}$ of the Lempel-Ziv 78 factorization can increase by a factor of $\Omega(n^{1/4})$ [Lagarde and Perifel, 2018], and the number $r$ of runs in the Burrows-Wheeler transform can increase by a factor of $\Omega(\log n)$ [Giuliani et al., 2021] when a character is prepended to an input string of length $n$. By applying our sensitivity bounds of $\delta$ or the smallest grammar to known results (c.f. [Navarro, 2021]), some non-trivial upper bounds for the sensitivities of important string compressors and repetitiveness measures including $\gamma$, $r$, LZ-End, RePair, LongestMatch, and AVL-grammar are derived.