On the approximation ratio of Lempel-Ziv parsing

Abstract

Shannon’s entropy is a clear lower bound for statistical compression. The situation is not so well understood for dictionary-based compression. A plausible lower bound is b, the least number of phrases of a general bidirectional parse of a text, where phrases can be copied from anywhere else in the text. Since computing b is NP-complete, a popular gold standard is z, the number of phrases in the Lempel-Ziv parse of the text, where phrases can be copied only from the left. While z can be computed in linear time, almost nothing has been known for decades about its approximation ratio with respect to b. In this paper we prove that z = O(b log(n/b)), where n is the text length. We also show that the bound is tight as a function of n, by exhibiting a string family where z = Ω(b log n). Our upper bound is obtained by building a run-length context-free grammar based on a locally consistent parsing of the text. Our lower bound is obtained by relating b with r, the number of equal-letter runs in the Burrows-Wheeler transform of the text. On our way, we prove other relevant bounds between compressibility measures.