🔗 Burrows–Wheeler Transform

🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Computational Biology

The Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT, also called block-sorting compression) rearranges a character string into runs of similar characters. This is useful for compression, since it tends to be easy to compress a string that has runs of repeated characters by techniques such as move-to-front transform and run-length encoding. More importantly, the transformation is reversible, without needing to store any additional data except the position of the first original character. The BWT is thus a "free" method of improving the efficiency of text compression algorithms, costing only some extra computation. The Burrows–Wheeler transform is an algorithm used to prepare data for use with data compression techniques such as bzip2. It was invented by Michael Burrows and David Wheeler in 1994 while Burrows was working at DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California. It is based on a previously unpublished transformation discovered by Wheeler in 1983. The algorithm can be implemented efficiently using a suffix array thus reaching linear time complexity.