The Burrows-Wheeler Transform:

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Introduction

   Pages 1-17

3. How the Burrows-Wheeler Transform works

   Pages 19-31

4. Coders for the Burrows-Wheeler Transform

   Pages 33-50

5. Suffix trees and suffix arrays

   Pages 51-89

6. Analysis of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform

   Pages 91-151

7. Variants of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform

   Pages 153-186

8. Exact and approximate pattern matching

   Pages 187-263

9. Other applications of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform

   Pages 265-303

10. Conclusion

    Pages 305-307

11. Back Matter

    Pages 309-351

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The Burrows-Wheeler Transform is one of the best lossless compression me- ods available. It is an intriguing — even puzzling — approach to squeezing redundancy out of data, it has an interesting history, and it has applications well beyond its original purpose as a compression method. It is a relatively late addition to the compression canon, and hence our motivation to write this book, looking at the method in detail, bringing together the threads that led to its discovery and development, and speculating on what future ideas might grow out of it. The book is aimed at a wide audience, ranging from those interested in learning a little more than the short descriptions of the BWT given in st- dard texts, through to those whose research is building on what we know about compression and pattern matching. The ?rst few chapters are a careful description suitable for readers with an elementary computer science ba- ground (and these chapters have been used in undergraduate courses), but later chapters collect a wide range of detailed developments, some of which are built on advanced concepts from a range of computer science topics (for example, some of the advanced material has been used in a graduate c- puter science course in string algorithms). Some of the later explanations require some mathematical sophistication, but most should be accessible to those with a broad background in computer science.

• BWT
• Burrows Wheeler
• Compression
• Information
• Lossless
• Lossy
• Pattern Matching
• Suffix Arrays
• algorithms
• ants
• data compression
• data structures

From the reviews:

"The focus of the book, the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT), is an algorithm … used in data compression and pattern matching. … A major strength of the book is the clear writing style and the easy-to-follow flow. … On one hand, a student or faculty will discover theoretical topics related to information theory and pattern recognition. On the other, computational scientists will be attracted to the many applications of the BWT transform. All in all, it is a worthwhile lecture." (Stefan Robila, ACM Computing Reviews, November, 2008)

“This book exposes the reader to many applications of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform … . This book invites the reader to explore a new topic. … I can recommend this text to a wide variety of readers. This book is well suited for a researcher … who seeks to understand the Burrows-Wheeler Transform and its many applications to existing framework of algorithms. … This would be a wonderful course textbook since its coverage is comprehensive … . Many computer scientists can gain from reading this book.” (Shoshana Neuburger, SIGACT News, Vol. 41 (1), 2010)

• West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA

  Donald Adjeroh

• University of Canterbury, New Zealand

  Tim Bell

• University of Central Florida, 32816-2362, Orlando, USA

  Amar Mukherjee

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