Algorithm used in data compression techniques
Also known as block-sorting compression · BWT
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5 identifiers linking Burrows–Wheeler transform across the web's reference databases
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The Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT) rearranges a character string into runs of similar characters, in a manner that can be reversed to recover the original string. Since compression techniques such as move-to-front transform and run-length encoding are more effective when such runs are present, the BWT can be used as a preparatory step to improve the efficiency of a compression algorithm, and is used this way in software such as bzip2. The algorithm can be implemented efficiently using a suffix array thus reaching linear time complexity.