Hybrid Compression of Bitvectors for the FM-Index

Compressed bit vectors supporting rank and select operations are the workhorse of compressed data structures. We propose a hybrid scheme for implementing compressed bit vectors, which divides the bit vector into blocks and then chooses the encoding of each block separately from a number of different encoding methods. Hybrid encoding is particularly suitable for bit vectors that have lots of local and regional variation, such as those present in the FM-index, a popular compressed data structure for pattern matching. We propose a specific hybrid combination of three simple encoding methods for FM-index bit vectors achieving superior space-time tradeoffs in experiments.