Order-Preserving Indexing

Kubica et al. 33 and Kim et al. 29 introduced order-preserving pattern matching: for a given text the goal is to find its factors having the same 'shape' as a given pattern. Known results include a linear-time algorithm for this problem (in case of polynomially-bounded alphabet) and a generalization to multiple patterns. We propose an index that enables order-preserving pattern matching queries in time proportional to pattern length. The index can be constructed in O ( n log ź log ź n ) expected time or in O ( n log 2 ź log ź n / log ź log ź log ź n ) worst-case time. It is an incomplete order-preserving suffix tree which may miss a single edge label at each branching node. For most applications such incomplete suffix trees provide the same functional power as the complete ones. We show a number of their applications, including computation of longest common factors, longest previously occurring factors and squares in a string in the order-preserving setting. We also give an O ( n log ź n ) -time algorithm constructing complete order-preserving suffix trees.