Linear-time construction of suffix arrays

  • Authors:
  • Dong Kyue Kim;Jeong Seop Sim;Heejin Park;Kunsoo Park

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pusan National University;Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea;School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University;School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University

  • Venue:
  • CPM'03 Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Combinatorial pattern matching
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The time complexity of suffix tree construction has been shown to be equivalent to that of sorting: O(n) for a constant-size alphabet or an integer alphabet and O(n log n) for a general alphabet. However, previous algorithms for constructing suffix arrays have the time complexity of O(n log n) even for a constant-size alphabet. In this paper we present a linear-time algorithm to construct suffix arrays for integer alphabets, which do not use suffix trees as intermediate data structures during its construction. Since the case of a constant-size alphabet can be subsumed in that of an integer alphabet, our result implies that the time complexity of directly constructing suffix arrays matches that of constructing suffix trees.