Abstract not found

Many applications dealing with large data structures can benefit from keeping them in compressed form. Compression has many benefits: it can allow a representation to fit in main memory rather than swapping out to disk, and it improves cache performance since it allows more data to fit into the cache. However, a data structure is only useful if it allows the application to perform fast queries (and updates) to the data.

We consider the problem of maintaining a dynamic dictionary T of keys and associated data for which both the keys and data are bit strings that can vary in length from zero up to the length w of a machine word. We present a data structure for this variable-bit-length dictionary problem that supports constant time lookup and expected amortized constant time insertion and deletion. It uses O(m + 3n − n log 2 n) bits, where n is the number of elements in T, and m is the total number of bits across all strings in T (keys and data). Our dictionary uses an array A[1... n] in which locations store variable-bit-length strings. We present a data structure for this variable-bit-length array problem that supports worst-case constant-time lookups and updates and uses O(m + n) bits, where m is the total number of bits across all strings stored in A. The motivation for these structures is to support applications for which it is helpful to efficiently store short varying length bit strings. We present several applications, including representations for semi-dynamic graphs, order queries on integers sets, cardinal trees with varying cardinality, and simplicial meshes of d dimensions. These results either generalize or simplify previous results.

This thesis introduces the concept of a heterogeneous decomposition of a balanced search tree and apply it to the following problems: • How can finger search be implemented without changing the representation of a Red-Black Tree, such as introducing extra storage to the nodes? (Answer: Any degree-balanced search tree can support finger search without modification in its representation by maintaining an auxiliary data structure of logarithmic size and suitably modifying the search algorithm to make use of this auxiliary data structure.) • Do Multi-Splay Trees, which is known to be O(log log n)-competitive to the optimal binary search trees, have the Dynamic Finger property? (Answer: This is work in progress. We believe the answer is yes.)