List Update Algorithms for Data Compression

List update algorithms have been widely used as subroutines in compression schemas, most notably as part of Burrows-Wheeler compression. We performed an experimental comparison of various list update algorithms both as stand alone compression mechanisms and as a second stage of the BWT-based compression. We considered the following list update algorithms: move-to-front (MTF), sort-by-rank (SBR), frequency-count (FC), timestamp (TS), and transpose (TR) on text files of the Calgary Corpus. Our results showed that TR and FC usually outperform MTF and TS if we do not use BWT. This is in contrast with competitive analysis in which MTF and TS are superior to TS and FC. After BWT, MTF and TS have comparable performance and always outperform FC and TR. Our experiments are consistent with the intuition that BWT increases locality of reference and the predicted result from the locality of reference model of the work of Angelopoulos et al. (2008).