Adrian Goga, Andrej Balaz. Prefix-Free Parsing for Building Large Tunnelled Wheeler Graph. In Christina Boucher, Sven Rahmann, ed., Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI 2022), 242 volume of LIPIcs, pp. 18:1-18:12, 2022. Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik.

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Abstract:

We propose a new technique for creating a space-efficient index for large 
repetitive text collections, such as pangenomic databases containing 
sequences of many individuals from the same species. We combine two recent 
techniques from this area: Wheeler graphs (Gagie et al., 2017) and prefix-
free parsing (PFP, Boucher et al., 2019).

Wheeler graphs are a general framework encompassing several indexes based 
on the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT), such as the FM-index. Wheeler 
graphs admit a succinct representation which can be further compacted by 
employing the idea of tunnelling, which exploits redundancies in the form 
of parallel, equally-labelled paths called blocks that can be merged into a 
single path. The problem of finding the optimal set of blocks for 
tunnelling, i.e. the one that minimizes the size of the resulting Wheeler 
graph, is known to be NP-complete and remains the most computationally 
challenging part of the tunnelling process.

To find an adequate set of blocks in less time, we propose a new method 
based on the prefix-free parsing (PFP). The idea of PFP is to divide the 
input text into phrases of roughly equal sizes that overlap by a fixed 
number of characters. The phrases are then sorted lexicographically. The 
original text is represented by a sequence of phrase ranks (the parse) and 
a list of all used phrases (the dictionary). In repetitive texts, the PFP 
representation of the text is generally much shorter than the original 
since individual phrases are used many times in the parse, thus reducing 
the size of the dictionary.

To speed up the block selection for tunnelling, we apply the PFP to obtain 
the parse and the dictionary of the original text, tunnel the Wheeler graph 
of the parse using existing heuristics and subsequently use this tunnelled 
parse to construct a compact Wheeler graph of the original text. Compared 
with constructing a Wheeler graph from the original text without PFP, our 
method is much faster and uses less memory on collections of pangenomic 
sequences. Therefore, our method enables the use of Wheeler graphs as a 
pangenomic reference for real-world pangenomic datasets.